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.
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.
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.
Miniwiki is a very basic and light wiki application for any CFML engine. Although it is designed to have a very small footprint, it can be easily customized in terms of skinning and layout.
miniwiki uses a subset of reStructuredText as the syntax for the wiki pages, although it is trivially simple to replace the rendering mechanism to use WikiMedia syntax using the WikiConverter project.
miniwiki uses HomePortals as the layout engine and also to manage and store the content.
miniwiki is entirely file-based, although since it uses HomePortals resource libraries to store content you can also make it store content in something more exotic as Amazon S3.
Here is a demo, and you can download the project from RIAForge here.
A while ago I wrote a post about how to integrate the HomePortals layout rendering features into an a ColdBox application. Since then a lot has changed on both the HomePortals and ColdBox camps so I've been wanting to revisit that experiment and see if it could be made in an easier way now, using the advances on both frameworks. Read on for the findings.
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.
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.
I am finally ready to enter the testing/packaging phase for the new version of ColdBricks. ColdBricks, if you don't know is a CF-based Content Management System (CMS) that is used to build sites on a modular fashion.
This new version includes some nice features such as:
- Template management (author and manage your own page templates and layouts) - Module maker (create and customize your own configurable modules/widgets) - Site monitor (monitor site, cache, and memory status of your sites from within ColdBricks) - Fully modular and extensible architecture (think 'custom plugins') - A new and more simpler page management format - Create your own catalog of resources to use in your site (great complement to the ModuleMaker) - Completely updated rendering engine (yes, that means HomePortals 3.1) - And more!
At this moment there is not an official distribution package, but if you want to play around with it (and help me test and/or provide feedback), here are the download links:
Also you will need the new version of HomePortals: HomePortals 3.1
For both of these, just download and unzip on the root folder of your site, and go to http://your_domain/ColdBricks to get started.
Additionally some of the site templates in ColdBricks, like the StartPage and the Blog, require a couple of HomePortals plugins. Here are the links:
Again, just unzip on the root and thats it.
As for requirements, this version has been mostly developed on Railo 3, but was tested on CF 8.0.1. I did all my dev on a Windows machine, so if you test on a *nix or mac, let me know if you run into any upper/lowercase issue.
As always, documentation is still trailing behind (far behind), but i'll be happy to explain and even write some blog posts to clarify any doubt.
Feedback and bugs are **really** appreciated.
Cheers!
*** UPDATE: I updated the download links to point to the general downloads page for each project, rather than a specific release. From each download page, you may download the "Beta" version for each project.
Recently I finished overhauling the way HomePortals 3.1 handles page templates and wanted to find a real-life (and useful) way in which I could demonstrate its new features. So, in this post I want to show how the templating features in the new HomePortals version can be leveraged to provide layout management capabilities on top of an existing application like BlogCFC. Why BlogCFC? well, first because it has a great segmentation between the blogging engine (the actual blog.cfc) and its presentation layer, and second because I already use it on my own blog and have plenty of real-life data to play with.
