I just posted to RIAForge an update to the BugLogHQ bug agregator, percolator and assimilator. This is a small update that includes some bug fixes and contributions.

The update can be found at http://bugloghq.riaforge.org/.

Also on a related note, over the weekend at work (where we use BugLogHQ) we had a ton of bug reports in BugLog that could not be saved to the DB and remained on the queue. All of them had some weird errors while trying to save a text column to the DB.

All the errors where something along the lines of:

After googling a bit, it turned out that it was a character encoding issue (the bug reports were coming from a site that could display Japanese content). After looking at the DB I saw that all the BugLogHQ tables where using the "Latin1" charset. After changing the charset to utf8 and the collating to utf8_unicode_ci, the problem went away and the entries were successfully saved to the DB.

So as a precaution, in this update the SQL script to create the required tables now set the charset and collating correctly.

However if you are experiencing this problem just change the charset and collating in your db tables to fix it.

For MySQL you can do this in the command line with something like this:

And repeat for any other table/column that is giving you problems.

The new update for HomePortals is now released. The current version is 3.1.570; This is a roll up of all the latest bug fixes since the last release. If you use the nightly build then you will not notice any difference right now.

The full post about what is new/fixed on this release is here:

http://www.homeportals.net/blog/index.cfm/2010/4/15/Version-31570-Released

All comments are welcome!

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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