nil desperandum

I was going to be doing a presentation to night on Farcry 3.x and an intro to FC4, but unfortunately I'm going to have to put it off for tonight. Its not a major delay though, just until tomorrow night. So it'll be the same time and same place, just 8PM GMT Thursday night rather than Wednesday night. Sorry about that folks...

I'm not sure quite what I've let myself in for, but after some questions came up on the Scottish CFUG Google Group about farcry and tutorials I've agreed to do a beginners guide to Farcry 3.x and a quick demo of some of the features of Gonzales (FC 4.0) I'm not going to go into any major depth, but will be covering the following:

• Basic premise:
  1. setting up FC3.0.2
  2. getting started with content management
  3. creating simple custom types.
• Additional -
  1. Brief overview of FC4.0 (Gonzales)
  2. Libraries
  3. Form Tools

This'll be held on Adobe Connect (Breeze) at 8pm GMT on Wednesday 29th November. The URL will be : http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/r85058415/

I recently grabbed the latest nightly build from Jeff Coughlin and had it running a copy of our works website on my laptop for a few days before I put the updated fourq and farcry_core files on to the production server. During the time I was working with it locally, I didn't notice any problems with it. It was all running really well. When I put it live it all continued to run really well. Except for the sudden panic from my colleague who does all the editing of content on the site!

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This was a question I had when I first started using farcry.

How do I display an image in a container on a page in my farcry site?

Its a question that has come up a couple of times since and its actually pretty easy to answer. You would normally include an image into a container using the handpicked rule in a container, when you're in design mode on the front of your site. The only problem is that images aren't listed as an "object" that you can select. The reason for this is that in the core of farcry doesn't allow the dmImage object to be list under the handpicked rule. Fortunately its really very easy to make it listed. In order to allow a type to be listed you need to have bSchedule="1" as an attribute in the component tag. To make the core dmImage component have this attribute, without editing the core code, you simply extend dmImage in your farcry project. <cfcomponent extends="farcry.farcry_core.packages.types.dmImage"
          displayName="Images"
          bSchedule="1">
</cfcomponent> After this all you need to do is set up some displays in your webskin for dmImage and you're away. Attached to this post is a small zip that goes into your farcry project folder that does exactly that for you. UPDATE: Thanks for the comment Jeff. Much appreciated. I'm still a bit of a noob when it comes to Farcry, but I'm slowly getting there, so any and all suggestions/hints/slaps are most welcome. In line with your suggestion I've updated the zip file attached to this post and the image paths now use #application.url.webroot# to specify the relative path to the image folder.

I got a little annoyed at the scope dump feature in the admin section of Farcry's admin console today, so I rewrote it. Please don't think for a minute that I'm having a go at farcry - I just needed this function to be a bit more friendly. ;) The default is to dump the whole of the scope out, which is fine for scopes with only a few keys in them, like the request scope, but the application and session scopes are absolutely stuff with objects some of which are upto 5 levels deep (he says guestimating). Rendering all that html takes what feels like a life time complete and Firefox will tell you that a script may be having problems and ask you if you want to stop or continue. What I've done is rewrite it with a little bit of javascript to relate the drop down of the scopes with a drop down of their top level keys, so that at least you only pick one key from a scope rather than all of the keys. Its pretty down and dirty, but it works... The attached file belongs in /farcry_core/admin/admin/ folder. Admittedly I did feel a little guilty changing a core file, but what the heck its only a small file and not like its part of the cfcs. Just make sure you keep a copy of the original scopeDump.cfm file if you decide you don't like my hack, but I do hope others find it useful.