One thing I think makes FarCry extremely powerful and flexible is the ability to customize or extend just about everything. One requirement we had for the new Alagad site was that we wanted to be able to store additional information about each employee of Alagad. To accomplish this we needed to do quite a few customizations. First, we needed to extend the core 'dmProfile' object to add the fields we wished to store. Second, we needed to modify the forms users see to modify their own information.

Alagad recently published a new corporate website. A part of this project was the Alagad Team Blog, which I wrote. The blog is nice, but it is written on top of Farcry and thusly, is a pain to add new entries to. (It requires a vast number of clicks before you can publish your new blog entry.) Furthermore, TinyMCE, which Farcry uses as it’s primary editor, is really not the best tool for editing blog entries. All too frequently the HTML comes out a bit wonkey.

Some time back, I posted a series of blog entries regarding data validation, seeking input on how developers approached the issue. I felt at the time, and still do, that data validation is not something that should have to be rewritten from scratch for each new application. Sure, validation rules are different, but the core concept of data validation is no different.

Thanks to everybody both on the blog and various other forums for the suggestions on fixing the access issue with the Reactor subversion repository. In the end, I still have no idea what was wrong. I finally got so fed up with it, that I wiped out the entire Apache configuration and started from scratch. Guess what? It worked. So, for anybody looking at the mixed authentication example in the Subversion book, it does work.

Recently in upgrading some of our systems, we moved all of our Trac sites and SVN repositories over to a single server running the latest versions of Trac and SVN. Now most of these sites and repositories are for client projects and are therefore secure. A couple of the SVN repositories are for open source projects however - Reactor being one of them. Therefore, we need to allow anonymous read access and here lies the issue.

Here is a leading question, if you could chose anywhere for new code or a complete application NOT to break where would you chose that not to happen - Development, Staging-QA or Production? I know the answer is obvious – Production! Yet I have spent seven years total travelling the world helping medium and large entities recover from web applications that were breaking in Production, either partially or totally.

The first entry in my FarCry series will discuss how we set up a custom installation of FarCry, or more specifically, our site. First, a little background. We followed the install instructions here, however, something about the default directory structure didn't sit well with us. The one big issue is that, by default, all your 'projects' or sites that will use FarCry, are stored in a directory under the main FarCry directory.

Here at Alagad, we are in the business of not only writing code, but developing and deploying enterprise class applications. Doing this properly involves a lot more than just writing ColdFusion, Flex, etc. code. When developing an application, we have distributed development environments, a testing/staging area, and a production/release area. We use Subversion for source control and a variety of other testing tools.

When Adobe purchased Macromedia and ColdFusion with it, you knew there had to be more integration with Adobe products coming including PDF. Before Adobe came along, doing anything with PDF documents required great difficulty and usually a 3rd party library. This has improved in recent versions of ColdFusion and now with ColdFusion 8, you can do virtually anything you need - from creating new PDF documents to managing, merging, and manipulating existing PDF documents.

If you are reading this, chances are you have noticed that Alagad.com was given a little bit of a makeover. Besides getting a new coat of paint, we also ripped out all the plumbing and replaced it with FarCry. Most people would descibe FarCry as a content management system (CMS), but it is much more than that. FarCry is more of a framework, on which the CMS we all know is built.During development the Alagad team ran into some walls, which stemmed more from unfamiliarity with FarCry than anything else.