Objective Bias

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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Recently, Akash Bavlecha pointed out to me that the SyntaxHighlighter Mango Plugin that I built only worked when it was used in the main "content" field of a post/page. If he tried to use it in the "excerpt" field, it didn't work. Turns out that this was the result of an omission on my part which I didn't notice because I have yet to highlight code in an excerpt.

In any case, I have fixed this issue and version 2.0.1 of the plugin now works when used in both Content and Excerpt sections of posts or pages (which is the way it was meant to work from the beginning). If you downloaded the plugin before January 2, you should upgrade the plugin by using the same install URL as found at the bottom of the original post.

I apologize for any inconvenience and/or confusion this may have caused, and thanks Akash for alterting me to this!

I was working on a web site which uses Mura CMS. I needed to publish some videos on the site and instead of using my bandwidth, I decided to stream them from YouTube. I didn't see any way to do this with Mura out of the box, so I decided to code up a little plugin which I think others might find useful. This plugin enables you to embed videos from YouTube, Yahoo, Vimeo, or MetaCafe using a simple tag syntax which you can place right into Mura's WYSIWYG content editor.

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A little while ago, I released a SyntaxHighlighter Plugin for Mango Blog. Although I was fairly happy with my first Mango plugin, I still thought there was room for improvement. Certain things about it bugged me, so I finally dug in and did a complete rewrite. So I am very pleased to release version 2.0 of the plugin! Here is a list of the improvements introduced in this version:

• It uses the latest version (2.1.364) of Alex Gorbatchev's SyntaxHighlighter script. The previous version of the plugin used the deprecated version 1.5.1.
• I eliminated the dependency on the syntaxhl TinyMCE plugin (which added a syntaxhiglighter button to the WYSIWYG editor) to do the syntax highlighting. I found that using syntaxhl was kind of clunky and now you can simply insert code by pasting it directly into the editor between a pair of [code][/code] tags (without disabling TinyMCE or going into "source view"). Therefore, this new version won't add a syntaxhighlighter button to the editor. Please read the README file (included in the download) for more details on how to use the plugin.
• Along with the latest version of the SyntaxHighlighter script comes configurable themes to change the look of the syntax highlighting as well as several new syntax "brushes" (including Groovy, Scala, Erlang, and a few others).
• "Legacy Mode" can be enabled for those who used the previous version of my plugin (or just SyntaxHighlighter 1.5.1 directly) and have a lot of existing posts. This setting will make the plugin backward-compatible.
• The plugin itself was refactored to take advantage of the enhancements to Mango's plugin architecture that were introduced with version 1.3 of Mango.

I hope people find this useful. There are more details in the README file included with the plugin, so make sure to read that so you can take advantage of the new features. People upgrading from version 1 of my plugin should especially read it.

Please note: this plugin was made so that authors wouldn't have to switch back and forth between WYSIWYG mode and HTML mode to add code blocks in their posts. This plugin will ONLY work properly if the code blocks are entered in WYSIWIG mode (you should see a tool bar at the top of the content editor). If the top of your content editor looks like this:

Click on the little pencil-and-paper icon to get back into WYSIWIG mode for it to look like this:

And you should be good to go!

Get the SyntaxHighLighter Plugin

Plugin version:

2.0.1

Last Updated:

2010-01-02

Requires:

Mango Blog 1.3+

Auto-install URL:

http://mangoblog-extensions.googlecode.com/files/syntaxhighlighter_mango_plugin.zip