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Category: Open-Source CF

Jun 17, 2010

Connecting Mura CMS to an ORM Application

Some of you may be wondering, based upon the title of this post, why you would want to connect a Mura CMS application to ColdFusion ORM. Let me give a long-winded explanation. Unless your site is entirely content driven you will often have large portions of your site that are not contained within the CMS (we'll refer to this as an external application). Mura makes it easy to connect the CMS portion of your site to another application (this is especially easy if the other application uses a front-controller framework). However, you may often need to display some portion of data from your non-Mura external application in the content-driven portion of your site. For example, let's imagine a site like Twitter (another clone perhaps) whereby the informational content (i.e. home page, about us, documentation, help and so on) may be CMS-driven but we'd also like to display a list of top tweets on the home page that are pulled from outside the CMS.

So, that's the background on why you might need Mura to speak to an outside application. However, now imagine that outside application has services that rely on ColdFusion 9 ORM. In the case of my Twitter-clone site, I can't just directly call tweetService.getTopTweets() from my Mura driven home page because the Mura application does not have ORM enabled. You could use a remote method and call that via Ajax or a webservice since a remote call would mean the method call is instantiated within the external application's application context (i.e. it has ORM enabled) but that isn't always a desirable solution. Thankfully, as of a recent update, you can easily connect your Mura site to your external ORM application. I will show you how to do this by instantiating the ORM context within Mura thereby allowing you to directly call ORM-dependent service methods like tweetService.getTopTweets().

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Jun 15, 2010

Adding Solr Search to Mura CMS

The best thing about Mura CMS is that much of what you need to build a typical content managed site is already built-in. However, the second best thing about Mura CMS is that anything that isn't built in can generally be added in using its extensibility without breaking your upgrade path. In the case of my application, one of the requirements was that we use ColdFusion 9's new Solr-based search engine to index all of the site content. By default, Mura uses a standard query based searching, in part, I suspect, because its designed to run on the other CFML engines should you choose to. I am running ColdFusion 9, so I want Solr! Here's how I did it.

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Jun 08, 2010

ColdFusion Open Source Update - June 8, 2010

Three new projects and three updates this week in ColdFusion open source. Actually, this post covers more than a week as things were a little slow the week before last so I held the post. My guess is that with summer starting, the warm weather and vacations are getting in the way of coding. I know they are getting in the way of mine.

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May 27, 2010

ColdFusion Open Source Update - May 27, 2010

One new and one updated project this week in ColdFusion open-source but also a number of plugins for a continually growing open source ecosystem in ColdFusion. In other news, it sounds like NCDevCon was a success and I congratulate the team who put the event on, including Dan Wilson, Jim Priest and many others. Hopefully I will get to make it next year.

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May 20, 2010

ColdFusion Open Source Update - May 20, 2010

Two new projects and two updates but lots of announcements and tutorials this week in ColdFusion open source. I am sure a lot of you readers are excited preparing for your trips to NCDevCon this weekend. I wish I could go, I just can't make it to every conference out there. Basically, what I am saying is that I am no Simon Free, conference junkie extraordinaire. Methinks Simon probably still has alcohol running through his system from last weekends Flash and the City even as he heads to NCDevCon. Have fun Simon and the rest of you!

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