A few days ago I released the latest update to the HomePortals framework and its counterpart management platform ColdBricks. Besides the obligatory bug fixes and improvements, there was one new major feature on this release: the CMS Plugin. The CMS Plugin is a HomePortals extension to provide content management and site administration features to any HomePortals-based application without requiring the use of an external application (like ColdBricks) or building your own administration features.

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I just pushed new updated versions of HomePortals and ColdBricks to their respective sites and are now available for download. As usual the updates contain multiple bug fixes and small improvements here and there. However there are a couple of features that are worth mentioning.

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A while ago I shared a small framework I created which I use to develop pretty much all of my projects (both open source and paid engagements). The framework, as is usual for web frameworks, follows the MVC and Front Controller patterns; also like Sean Corfield's FW/1 and Barney's FB3 Lite (and many others) it has an emphasis on minimalism and makes an effort to stay out of the way as much as possible. I recently made some changes to the framework and wanted to share them with the community.

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A few weeks ago I wrote about how to use the layout management features of HomePortals on a ColdBox 3 application. This time I want to show how to do the same but with an application built with the Model-Glue framework and also explain a bit more of why would you want to do so in the first place.

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A new update to ColdBricks CMS is now available for everyone to download and play. This is still part of the greater 1.1 release but it adds some new interesting features that I thought would be interesting to blog about. Besides the obligatory bug fixes/performance enhancements, the two most prominent features are Custom Resource Libraries and the completion of a full modular architecture, including the option to install/uninstall modules directly by the end user.

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Today I uploaded to RIAForge an update to CFShell. This update focused on making the client behave more like a standard command line tool, and also added a couple of useful commands and shorthand expressions to the shell.

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Many times when we are working on our ColdFusion apps there are situations in which we want to quickly evaluate something or try some one or two-liner snippets to do something quick. The typical process then is that we have to create a .cfm page, put in on the server, go to the browser and execute it. And that's pretty much the only way we have for interacting with the CFML engine. This contrasts with other languages like Ruby, Python, or even PHP in which you can quickly interact with the language directly from a command line or terminal window. Wouldn't it be nicer to have the inmmediate satisfaction of evaluating our CFML/cfscript statements interactively? Well, that's where CFShell comes in.

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I wanted to quickly share that two new ColdFusion websites have been launched recently: MSDynamicsWire.com (a news portal) and Meancycles Owners Galleries (a social network). Both sites were developed using HomePortals and ColdBricksCMS.

Both sites show different level of integration and customization, as each serves a very different function, but they are good examples of the wide range of solutions that can be obtained by combining the HomePortals framework with the ColdBricksCMS platform.

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One very useful feature of BugLogHQ is the 'Rules' feature. These are basically rules or conditions that get evaluated every time a bug report is processed and can be used to provide custom behaviour. Rules may be used for things like alerting you when some special condition happens; For example you can create a rule that will send you an email as soon as you receive a bug report with the words "stack overflow" on it, or to possibly send you an SMS message once the amount of errors on the last X minutes is greater than 100 errors, or well, you get the idea.

In this article I want to go over how rules are implemented and give a brief example of how to create your own rules and add them to your BugLogHQ instance.

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The newest release for BugLogHQ is now available for download at RIAForge. This new version has lots of new additions and improvements that will make it even more powerful and easier to use.

Here are some of the highlights of the new version:

» Asynchronous processing of bug reports and rules. I think this is the single most important feature of the release, so I'll go into a bit of detail here. In the previous versions every time the listener received a bug from another application it had to parse the bug, add one or more records to the database and process any rules that were defined; although this implementation responded very well (even collecting errors for a 30+ server deployment on a really high traffic website), it was obvious that this approach was not going to be very scalable, especially if many rules were defined for processing. So, on the new version the receiving and processing of bugs are two independent processes; that way BugLog can receive a bug and return a response to the caller application almost immediately since there is virtually no processing done at that time. It's responsibility of another process fired at regular intervals to process all bug reports on a queue along with any rules that are defined and this process can now takes its sweet time to do whatever it needs to do without the pressure of having to return a response to the caller application.

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