First new feature I want to talk about is the ability to pass tag attributes into tags as a structure. I love this feature and honestly I would never have even thought to put this on any type of "wishlist". If you have optional attributes that you want to pass into a tag such as cfmail the only way to accomplish this right now is by using some conditional logic. For our example we will use a method that contains a sends an email message based on the .

You heard me right I said tags not things. That is because today I came across another situation where a very popular custom tag was the right solution. If you have been developing for any amounts of time I am sure you have come across the related selects problem. What is that you ask? Two related selects is where the second select box is populated based on the users selection from the first. So how do you go about this without tricky Javascript? That is the easy part.

Do you have an idea for an open source project that would contribute the to ColdFusion community? If so you could win a Nintendo Wii & a trip to CFUnited. I happen to have a great idea and finally some time to work on it. If you would like to find out more you can visit Ben Nadel's blog for contest rules. The entry deadline is June 5th so get coding.

In The ColdFusion Community I have 3 podcasts that I listen to wehenver new episodes appear. ColdFusion Weekly Helms & Peters Out loud cfFrameworks I would like to introduce all of my readers to another podcast that I believe you should add to your rotation. The podcast titled EOC Podcast which stand for Engines of Creation Podcast. You can view the podcast by clicking on the link below.

Our clients use a CMS system that was built in house. Last week I started added the ability to produce a sitemap. One gotcha that I did not realize was the date needs to be in a particular format, the format of your dates should be "yyyy-mm-dd". If you do not put your dates in this format or the long version, you will receive an error when submitting your sitemap. Here is the code we use to generate our sitemap.

I ran across a small problem today with regards to a dates month. You may come across this problem in a different context but I have a quick and easy solution for all occasions. In a shopping cart application the processor I am using (Payflow Pro) needs a 2 digit month for the expiration date. This means that for the month of march we need to represent it as 03 and not just 3. So whats the problem? Even when you format the date we drop leading zero's.

Today we ran into an interesting problem here at work that some people may have already come across. Our goal was to print out a gant chart that we are dynamically generating. From a screen standpoint everything was looking great however when we went to print chart the color coding was gone. There are anywhere from 10-50 different colors on this chart so color printing was absolutely a requirement. So what was happening to the colors, in short nothing.

As explained in the ColdFusion Administrator the Request Timeout property allows us to terminate requests that take longer than the specified time. This prevents unusually long requests from occupying server resources and impairing the performance of other requests. There are two ways to control this time. The first and easiest is to set a global time for your server in the administrator. When logged in click on the settings button under Server Settings.

As explained in the ColdFusion Administrator the Request Timeout property allows us to terminate requests that take longer than the specified time. This prevents unusually long requests from occupying server resources and impairing the performance of other requests. There are two ways to control this time. The first and easiest is to set a global time for your server in the administrator. When logged in click on the settings button under Server Settings.

I have just started to read a new book titled The pragmatic programmer. I am quickly realizing why everyone has dubbed this book a must have for all programmers. I am only into the 2nd chapter but I already found something I would like to share with you. This may seem like a no brainer to most of you but to some beginners this is a very important lesson to building a reusable & scalable system. So how and why would we avoid global data.