Objective Bias

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!

Below are the descriptions of the topics I submitted:

Developing Mura CMS Plugins for Fun and Profit!

Mura is an open source ColdFusion CMS which offers the developer several ways to integrate custom code. One way to extend Mura is through plugins, which are written in CFML (of course) and allow the developer to customize and add functionality to the CMS without modifying the core code. Plugins can range in scope from simple enhancements fo full applications. This session will be an introduction to plugin development for Mura CMS, focusing on the 3 main aspects of plugin development: configuration, event handlers, and display objects. Concepts will be illustrated with walkthroughs of code from an example plugin.

Extending Railo with CFC-based Custom Tags

Railo is an open source alternative CFML engine. One of Railo's novel features is that it enables developers to extend it by writing custom tags with ColdFusion Components (CFCs). These CFCs can be used as traditional custom tags or even deployed to run as built-in tags. This session will go over how custom tags can be implemented in Railo using CFCs. Examples will be used to illustrate the process of building CFC-based custom tags and what benefits they may provide over traditional custom tags.