I decided a while back that I wanted to move from MangoBlog to something simpler. I wanted to get back to writing blogs rather than messing about with the application.
As you can tell from the title of this post and the lovely oranginess of my blog I ended up coming back to BlogCFC.
This blog round up is somewhat later than I had intended, but for good reason. I've been waiting for a couple of blog posts to emerge into the public domain, so that I could include them in the round up. I can't impress upon you how important it is to read these posts.
This started out as me trying to sort out the code display, which incidently, I still haven't managed to do and ended up as a plugin to help manage TinyMCE settings.
I've been tweaking and messing with the layout.cfm file trying to sort out how to get the code panels working properly without having mess about with switching off javascript and tinymce and so on.
I get kinda grumpy when I start messing with core files, so I decided I should really work out how to make the changes more flexible and easier to fix when updates to MangoBlog are released.
This is by no means a silver bullet. If the admin/layout.cfm file is changed it will be necessary to remake the layout.cfm file for the plugin. Hopefully someone will find it useful
What I've done is taken a copy of the standard layout.cfm file and pulled out the plugin, button bars and extended valid element setting sections. These I've replaced them with 3 admin events that are associated with the a matching set of preferences. I've also added in an admin event and preference so that you can add any additional config that you might need for specialist plugins. For instance this could be used for the plugin_asffileexplorer_browseurl and plugin_asffileexplorer_assetsUrl settings.
That's about it really.
Couple of things to know:
The settings page is kinda ropey, as I haven't really looked into the CSS side things properly. If anyone fancies tidyig it up..... :D
When you activate the plugin it will take a copy of your existing layout.cfm file and replace it with one from the plugin with the admin events in it.
You can download the plugin here
Please have a play with it, let me know of any enhancements you'd like to see and problems you find. And please for love of all that's good someone sort out my shocking CSS in the settings form! ;)
Phase 2 : sort out a plugin to implement SyntaxHighlighter with the ColdFusion brush and the syntaxhl tinymce plugin.
Its been a while since I posted anything to my blog. I've been busy at work with a large site that's now launched, busy at home with the ever growing/changing son and I've not long been back from a 2 week break in Spain.
The site that was launched while I was away on my holiday is a fairly large site for Benfield Motor Group. There's some neat work gone on in the background of the site. as with all these things there's a few tweaks to make, but its been well received by the client and everyone I've shown it to. You can see the site in action at http://www.drivebenfield.com/
You may have noticed a previous post where I was playing with Google Docs, Deepest Sender and ScribeFire. The idea is that I'm going to make a concerted effort to write more entries more regularly and the only way I can do this is with some assistance from the likes of Deepest Sender or ScribeFire. I'm currently using Deepest Sender, because of a problem in MB with ScribeFire and Dates. Laura has fixed the problem now in svn, but I think I'll be a lazy bum and just wait for MangoBlog 1.2 and run the full set of updates.
One of the things I'm going to do is start writing a blog round up, a la Andy Allan. I've been reading through various blogs and sending interesting tidbits around to colleagues here at work, so I thought I should actually write these up on my blog at the same time.
I also need to start back up with arranging Scottish ColdFusion User Group meetings and sorting the website out now that the summer is over. Any hints/tips/suggestions as to what you would like the UG to do with meeting time will be gratefully received.
One thing I should say, Adobe User Groups historically have only ever had one manager, but they've recently decided to set up the ability to have co-managers. Andy Allan used to be the manager of the Scottish CFUG and I took the role of manager with Andy agreeing to be an unofficial co-manager with me. Now I'm pleased to say that Andy is officially the co-manager of the Scottish CFUG.
Well I think that'll do for the minute. The blog round up I think I'll probably publish on a Friday lunch time (GMT). Otherwise, I'll post some more directed entries shortly.
Hope you've all had a good summer.
FeedPing is a great new plugin for MangoBlog for one of the "missing" features.
Just as I decide to go looking for it or actually attempt writing something there's a thread on the MangoBlog forums!
What is it? Well its an automatic blog aggregator pinger. When you post a new entry to your blog it will send a ping to your favourite aggregator, such as ColdFusion Blogger, Technorati, IceRocket or Feed-Squirrel to let them know that you've updated your blog.
Handy for letting everyone know you've written something without having to email them all or have to visit your blog. Nice work Russell! Thanks!
Well I've just updated my blog to use Mango Blog 1.0. It all looks great!
I'm pleased to see a couple of the things I mentioned from my first post, as well as the adjustment to TinyMCE that allows you to add <code></code> tags to your post.
I've added back in a couple of the buttons for TinyMCE editor that I find handy. These are blockquote, pasteword, fullscreen plugin and preview plugin. I added the following line to the admin/layout.cfm file in the TinyMCE config. You'll also need to add fullscreen and preview to the plugin config attributes.
This gives me the ability to add quotes to my posts, paste in from word (and other places that might have dodgy formatting), expand the editor to the full area of the browser window (I think I'm getting old I need a nice big editable area) and a quick preview of my entry.
If you want to find out more about this release of Mango blog take a look here on the Mango Blog website.
So where the bloody hell have I been?? Well I've been busy at work. This Software Development Manager lark seems to keep me busy with all sorts. I've set up SVN and Trac and we've been migrating slowly from Team Coherence to SVN. I've also set up a Snipex server for our developers. Thanks to Todd Sharp for the code to CFSnippets.org. I've been having a good tinker with jQuery recently, as well as looking at a bit of Flex, along with cracking on with a variety of client work.
Along with working I've been having great fun with my son (and the wife of course), who is now nearly 16 months old and running around everywhere, climbing over anything and everything and trying to repeat everything we say!
If I fail to keep up with writing proper blog entries, you can always find me on the new IRC, twitter.com.
So this is my first post with Mango Blog!
I'm liking what I'm seeing so far. I like the skin that I've downloaded and used on here as a quick fix and I kinda like the admin interface. Its... different to what I'm used to, but I'll get used to it.
The one thing that has annoyed me about Mango Blog, and yes I know its a known issues, but it shouldn't be an issue.... code blocks..... They only sort of work and you have to disable TinyMCE if you want to use them. bah bloody humbug I say!
In the admin folder you'll find layout.cfm. This is where TinyMCE is initialised. To the extended_valid_elements add ",code[class]". This will stop TinyMCE from stripping out the <code></code> tags. Then add "remove_linebreaks : false," somewhere in the init. I've inserted it straight after the mode: "exact", entry on mine. This prevents TinyMCE from stripping out linebreaks, so that your preformatted code doesn't end up all on one line.
Next time you edit a blog entry, you'll still have to use the HTML button to edit the source code, but at least now you can add code blocks without TinyMCE trashing them. Hope that helps someone.
Next job... Get my LastFM page working again and add something so I can have BlogCFC style text blocks.
