Resultant Systems

Splash CMS is an open source content management system that runs on top of CFWheels. It’s designed to be a simple, but elegant content management solutions for websites that are managed by small teams.

CFWheels is an open source ColdFusion framework that is inspired by Ruby on Rails. Besides being easy to use and learn, using CFWheels lets you adapt great ideas from Ruby on Rails (RoR) applications. RoR has the Radiant CMS, and Splash is the ColdFusion/CFWheels adaptation!

You can easily download Splash from http://wiki.github.com/russjohnson/SplashCMS/. The documentation for Splash is still kind of sparse, but the Radiant documentation is mostly applicable, and you can easily see how most things are supposed to work. Then, if you get stuck, email the Google Group.

Splash Layouts, Snippets, and Pages

Splash uses Layouts, Snippets, and Pages to build a website.

A layout, as you might imagine, is like a skin for an entire website. You can have multiple layouts and use different layouts for different pages.

Pages are specific URLs on a Splash site, and each page has a specific layout specified. A page can have multiple “page parts.” Most pages will have a “Body” part, but some might also have a “Sidebar” or other parts.

Snippets are reusable content chunks. You might have a navigation snippet that displays the main navigation for your site. Headers and Footers are other common snippets.

Splash Tags

There is one other very powerful component to Splash — Splash Tags. These are ColdFusion custom tags that extend ColdFusion and HTML to work with Splash. Here’s a simple example: the [ccei_cfm]<s:title /> [/ccei_cfm] tag. This tag just retrieves the page’s title from the page object and inserts it in place of the tag. So, in your layout, you would typically have something like:

[ccei_cfm]<title><s:title /></title>[/ccei_cfm]

The pages title information from the database is then easily inserted into the HTML title tag!

There are a lot more tags, so see the Wiki.

Splash in Action

I recently completed the DonorUp.com website using Splash. I was really pleased with how easily I was able to get many thing to come together. So, try Splash and leave a comment to let me know how you like it!

Clarke Bishop CFWheels, ColdFusion, Splash CMS CFWheels, ColdFusion, Splash CMS

Mura has a lot of interesting capabilities. However, the documentation is a little sparse.

Recently, I have been customizing a Mura site, so I thought I’d document some of the key things you need to know!

1 – Create a New Site to Customize

When initially installed, Mura automatically creates the  “Default” site. But, don’t customize this site. Make a new site and customize it. This way, you can still do Mura updates without overwriting your customizations.

• Login to your admin area
• Go to Site Settings -> Add New Site. (Site Settings is in the upper right of the admin screen.)
• Name the site whatever you want. For example, you might call it MySite.
• Now, when you go to customize things, don’t look in the Default folder. Instead find the MySite folder.
• If you want MySite to come up automatically when you go to www.YourDomain.com, click on Site Settings. Then, use the Order drop downs to set MySite to 1.

2 – Customize /MySite/includes/

Much of what you’ll want to customize is in the /MySite/Includes/ directory. Here are some things you might want to customize:

• If you are using a theme like Merced, customize the style sheet at /MySite/includes/themes/merced/css/site.css. It’s a good idea not to change the other style sheets. Just override the style in site.css. More Info from Mura …
• Again, if you’re using Merced or another theme, customize the templates at /MySite/includes/themes/merced/templates/.  Don’t forget to look in the /inc folder for the header and footer includes. More Info from Mura …

3 – Change the behavior of Display Objects

You can change how the Display Objects work! For many Display Objects, you can just copy the display object, put it in /MySite/includes/display_objects/custom/ and modify your copy. I wanted to add a download link to the images in the image gallery, so it was more complicated. Matt Levine of Mura advised me to:

• Go get /MySite/includes/eventHandler.cfc and add a new onGalleryBodyRender function (See below).
• Create a new directory named gallery at /MySite/includes/display_objects/custom/gallery. Into this new directory, copy index.cfm from /default/includes/display_objects/gallery/index.cfm. Now we have a copy of the gallery file to customize, so customize your heart out!
• Stay in /gallery/index.cfm. Find the references to getSite() and queryPermFilter() method calls. Change these to renderer.getSite() and renderer.queryPermFilter().
• Still in /gallery/index.cfm, change the template path in <cfinclude template=”../dsp_nextN.cfm”>. The new path should be ../../../dsp_nextN.cfm.
• Reload the app either by clicking Reload Application in the admin, or adding ?appreload to the end of the url. A lot of the objects are loaded when the application starts, so I found it’s a good idea to reload after making changes.

Here’s the code for the updated eventHandler.cfc:

[cf]

<cffunction name="onGalleryBodyRender" output="true" returntype="void">
<cfargument name="event">
<cfset var renderer=event.getContentRenderer()>
<cfsilent>
<cfset renderer.loadShadowBoxJS() />
<cfset renderer.addToHTMLHeadQueue("custom/gallery/htmlhead/gallery.cfm")>
<cfif not event.valueExists(‘galleryItemID’)><cfset event.setValue(‘galleryItemID’,”)></cfif>
</cfsilent>

<!— When you override default output you need to run content throught the renderer.setDynamicContent() method to process [mura] tag calls—>
<cfoutput>#renderer.setDynamicContent(event.getValue(‘contentBean’).getBody())#</cfoutput>

<!— Now include the customized display object —>
<cf_CacheOMatic key="portalBody#event.getValue(‘contentBean’).getcontentID()##event.getValue(’startRow’)##event.getValue(‘galleryItemID’)#" nocache="#event.getValue(‘r’).restrict#">
<cfinclude template="display_objects/custom/gallery/index.cfm">
</cf_CacheOMatic>

</cffunction>
[/cf]

I hope this helps someone get started with Mura! If you have suggestions for improving this information or just have a question, please leave a comment.

Clarke Bishop ColdFusion, Mura ColdFusion, Mura