If you ever wanted to modify ColdBricks or BugLog, but didn't understood how these application were constructed; or if you just want to see yet another way of developing CF applications, then this post may be for you.

I just posted some pages describing the framework I use for developing CF projects. It doesn't even has a proper name, I just call it "Core" due to its simplicity and its minimalistic nature. The basic principle of this framework, and the reason why I choose to use it instead of going with more traditional offerings, is that it only focuses on one thing and one thing only: provide a formal mechanism for going from one page to another and for invoking actions.

It doesn't do any fancy things, no complex request lifecycles, no sophisticated caching, no extensive API, none; however, it does provide enough extension points to which I can hook any functionality that I desire on a per-project basis. Basically the framework consists on a Front Controller implementation, a base event handler and a few conventions for directory structure and nomenclature.

Anyway, you can find the code and read more about this framework by going to the Projects section or by going directly here.

I realize I'm a bit late posting this now, but better late than never :) Last week I had the opportunity to do a presentation about ColdBricks to the Inland Empire's ColdFusion User Group (IECFUG). I want to thank Luis and all the IECFUG guys for inviting me and enduring my bad english and my blatant lack of PowerPoint/speaker skills; but hopefully they got to see a bit of ColdBricks in action and got a better idea of what ColdBricks brings to the ColdFusion's CMS market.

Here is a link to the recorded Adobe Connect presentation; also attached to this post are the presentation slides in PDF form. Feel free to take a look as it may answer some ColdBricks/HomePortals questions some people may have.

Again, thank you guys for the opportunity!

New updated versions of ColdBricks and HomePortals are now available for download.

ColdBricks 1.0.377:

- Fixed issues with case-sensitive OSes

- Fixed compatibility issues with BlueDragon

- Added option to edit current skin from the Page Editor screen

- Added option to create a Skin resource based on a page's local stylesheet

- Fixed minor bugs

HomePortals 3.0.189:

- Added support for BlueDragon and OpenBlueDragon

- Added support for case-sensitive operating systems

Also, the ColdBricks User's Guide is now finished and ready for download.

You can download the new ColdBricks release and the user's guide from the Downloads area in the ColdBricks site.

If you want to get the new HomePortals release by itself, you can get it from the HomePortals site.

Enjoy!

Well, its been an interesting few days after the release of ColdBricks. I am happy to see that it has generated a certain amount of interest in the ColdFusion community, and for what I've seen there was a definite desire to see more open source CMS solutions - I just say the more the better!

One of the main problems that people have pointed out in these days is the blatant lack of documentation for both HomePortals and ColdBricks. And they are right!! both projects can look a bit daunting without knowing what is what and where is everything. I've spent the last several months slaving myself over the code and really didn't had the time to focus on the documentation side. So now that the code for both projects is out in the wild I have tried to put a little bit of extra effort to produce at least 'some' documentation.

Thus, the first draft of the ColdBricks User's Guide is now available for download. This draft only contains the first three chapters of the entire guide. The chapters included are:

1. Overview 2. General Information 3. Getting Started

However this chapters provide a general overview of ColdBricks, its relation with HomePortals, how everything is organized and some quick reference guides on how to get to each part of the application.

This is a very early release and may very well have some typos and other bugs that need to be fixed, but I wanted to have something out quick for anyone that wanted to get their feet wet with ColdBricks. On the next few days I will continue working on the remaining chapters and publish the Guide when is ready.

The users guide can be obtained from the downloads area from the ColdBricks website.

In the meantime just play with it and have fun!

So it's official, my new venture is now live and open to the public. ColdBricks is a free and open source content management system specially tailored for highly modular websites like portals and dashboards. The current version runs on ColdFusion 7, 8 and Railo 2 (still having problems with BlueDragon though).

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Well, after several years of going back and forth with this project, I finally decided to share it with everyone and release my little baby as an open source project. HomePortals is a framework or platform for creating and running portals in ColdFusion. Most of the features in HomePortals focus around modularity, reusability of visual components, and personalization.

Besides providing the framework, conventions and APIs for creating the sites, HomePortals also acts as a 'runtime' or 'rendering' engine. All pages in a HomePortals application are actually XML documents that describe the elements and modules to display as well as their layout and arrangement. The HomePortals engine is responsible for reading, parsing and rendering the actual pages based on the specifications of the given XML documents. This is a little bit like MXML in Flex, but in ColdFusion.

I have succesfully tested HomePortals in ColdFusion MX 7, ColdFusion 8 and Railo 2. I have not yet had the chance to try it out in BlueDragon.

I created a small site for this project, where you can download the framework, a sample application and find some documentation. The URL for the site is http://www.homeportals.net

HomePortals has an LGPL license, which means that the library itself has to remain open source and any changes have to be shared, but it can also be used by non open source applications as an external library or component of the application.

If someone wants to try HomePortals out I'd really like to hear some feedback.

Another related project I will be releasing soon is ColdBricks... but I'll talk about that some other time :)