Objective Bias

I recently performed a minor update to my Embed Video Plugin for Mura CMS. One of the things this update addressed was a judge's comment from the Mura Plugin ColdFusion Throwdown contest, which basically pointed out that I didn't provide documentation for how the EmbedVideo tag could be used within a component (a Mura display component, not a CFC). Well, the original version actually couldn't be used within a Mura component. So I decided to do something about it and figured this would be a good opportunity to demonstrate how you can intercept and modify output in Mura using a plugin or your site's custom eventhandler.

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Wow! I was so happy to find out today that won first place in the Mura Plugin ColdFusion Throwdown! My entry was my Embed Video Plugin. I have to say, that I was sort of surprised and humbled, especially since my little plugin was pitted against such a great list of other plugins that were submitted.

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I know it's been very quiet here of late. I have a list of things I want to blog about, but between family time and client projects, it's been easy to put blogging low on the priority list. However, I have resolved to start managing my time to make more room for blogging and start crossing things off that list.

Two projects in particular (which I hope to be able to blog about soon) have been taking up a lot of my development time. One has me heavily into Mura CMS plugin development, and for the other I've been working with Railo CFC-based custom tags. I've been learning so much about both, so I have decided to submit a couple of topics for the upcoming CFUnited Conference.

CFUnited has opened topic voting to the public, so if you're interested in any of my topics, just go the the voting page and search for topics by Tony Garcia. There were a couple of other submissions on Mura plugin development, but I think I was the only one who had a topic on the CFC-based custom tags. It would be an incredible honor for me to speak at the conference, and I'll try my hardest to make it worth your while if I get to speak! Thanks!

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A lot of people have been asking/waiting for a forums plugin for Mura CMS. Grant Shepert and the folks at Clever Technology have been working on one and I just noticed that Meld Forums for Mura is now available for purchase and download. Just thought I'd help spread the word a little. You can get it here.

One of the (many) ways ColdFusion 9 has made developers' lives easier is by not requiring us to write accessor and mutator methods ("getters and setters") in our components. By setting accessors="true" in a component and defining some properties, we can call getProperty() and setProperty() on the component without having to actually write the methods. Rupesh Kumar has a detailed blog post on this feature.

While this can be a great time saver and unclutters our components from all those getter and setter methods, the thing I wasn't too crazy about is that when we call a setter method, the value is put into the variables scope of the component.

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