nil desperandum - Mango Blog

Moving MangoBlog Database entries to BlogCFC

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:26:00 -0700

Ray Camden got asked recently if it is possible to migrate database entries from MangoBlog to BlogCFC. Ray kindly pointed them to my "Return to BlogCFC" post where I talked about my trials and tribulations of moving from MangoBlog back to BlogCFC.What I didn't do in that blog post is provide the code that enabled me to actually do the move. Since I was asked for step by step instructions I thought I would post the code I used with a few notes. So here are the notes :

Its CF9 only, as I've used CF ORM functionality to hook into the MangoBlog database, rather than make calls through the MB API.
MangoBlog doesn't do enclosures by default, so if anyone has gone from BlogCFC to MB and back again they will lose all their enclosures.
If you've got excerpts in MB, then they will be dropped, as I couldn't come up with a good way of making sure that the excerpt wasn't also the first section of the content and insert a [more] tag appropriately.
Pages that are disabled on MB will still be copied across to BlogCFC and be displayed as there's no show/hide functionality on BlogCFC pages.
It does differentiate between posts and pages and inserts them into blogcfc appropriately
This code does take into account the revisions database table and uses the latest revision data to add to blogcfc.

The attached code doesn't move subscribers across, but it wouldn't be difficult to add. The final output is the number of blog entries posted across into BlogCFC along with dumps of any comments and their posts where comment spam was found. You need to have a datasource set up for your MangoBlog alongside a working copy of your new BlogCFC blog. You'll need to point the ORM part of the code at your MangoBlog DSN in the Application.cfc and configure the BlogCFC login and page cfc initialisation in the index.cfm. The only other thing that you will need to do is change the addComment() function in blogcfc.cfc. It needs an argument called "posted". You should default posted to blogNow(). The <cfqueryparam value="#blogNow()#" cfsqltype="CF_SQL_TIMESTAMP"> should be changed to use arguments.posted instead of blogNow(). This change allows you to add comments in with a specific date and time rather than "now", so that the date and time that the comment was originally posted can be maintained. And that's it really. The code isn't pretty, because I only wrote it for my own personal use, but it should be easy enough to see what is going on. Also, I haven't tested this code since blogcfc 5.9.5.004, so it might not work first time. Please do send me any tweaks you have to make to get it working with the latest version of BlogCFC and I'll make sure that the enclosure on this post stays up to date.

A Return to BlogCFC

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:11:00 -0700

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.Please don't get me wrong. I really liked MangoBlog from a user perspective, but as an application, when I have maybe an hour and a bit at night to poke around the hood... Well, lets just say we never really got on that well. I love the interface and the skinning, but I just couldn't get my head around the architecture and I seemed to break more stuff than I fixed. The breaking point was when I moved to a new host and couldn't get the search to work, either the built in verity search or the Google CSE search plugin. Now that may be a factor of the shared hosting I'm using these days, but it still annoyed me, I couldn't get past it and on to writing anything! I looked at leaving MangoBlog up and just starting again somewhere else, but I just didn't like the idea of leaving my old blog content in a busted up website. (My fault not MangoBlog's) I've been trying to persuade my modest 180+ blog posts into another blogging application. I had no real interest in WordPress; never liked the interface. Posterous quite happily imported my content, but it was all a bit untidy and would have taken me a life time to fix it. I have however, decided to put a few non-techie posts up on posterous, because it is such a lovely application for quick and easy personal and photographic blogging. I can write a post on my phone on the metro and post it in the 20 minutes it takes me to get home. I tried to get posts into Blogger, but the API and import routines are rubbish and everytime I had a success I'd then be held up by yet another failure. One of the things that did come out of messing with the Blogger Data API was a set of CFCs that gave me CF9 ORM access to the database. I'd thought of "reversing" the MangoBlog API to spit out the content, but given my previous "success" with the API and realising it actually gave me something to use to play with the new ORM features, I decided to take this route. New... Tsk... You see how long I've been messing about with this stuff now?!! How long has CF9 actually been out now? 3 months?? I digress... From the ORM I created a bunch of different functions and scripts to talk to the Blogger Data API, which eventually left me high and dry while trying to insert comments. Lets face it, the content on my blog "could do better", so the comments add value and I needed to maintained them as well. I had the means to get data out of my blog, but I'd run out of options as to where to post it on a hosted solution. That meant I would have to host it myself, but I didn't want to write any code, so back to BlogCFC it is! Why BlogCFC? Its great! I love it! Its simple, easy to use and pretty much lives in a dozen files. If I break the code, then there are only a few places for me to look. It really does "just work"! There are also a bunch of small things that I realised I missed from BlogCFC that aren't in the default MangoBlog. The bits that spring immediately to mind are enclosures, related entries and, the ego massager, stats. How did I get everything from MangoBlog into BlogCFC? I wrote a surprisingly simple bit of code that used the ORM to pull the appropriate data out of the live database and insert it into a shiny new BlogCFC database using the exceptionally easy to use org.camden.blog.blog methods. I had to make a tweak to the method to insert comments, so that I could maintain the post date of comments. I also hacked in a login to the blog.cfc and page.cfc. Its not pretty, but it worked quite nicely once I mapped all the data from MangoBlog to BlogCFC. I'm a hoarder. I keep copies of code from way back in the '90s, copies of database, documents, all sorts. I have a copy of my BlogCFC database from before I moved to MangoBlog. This meant that I could reattach my previous enclosures. I had to do this in two stages; first was a straight forward alias match, second stage was to do a title match and copy the data across. To be honest I was just happy that I'd managed to reattach all the enclosures, so I didn't look into why all the aliases didn't match. I think it might be blogcfc version related. Something that changed with the way the aliases are created, as it did seem to be older entries that didn't match. The only other thing that I've done to my installation of BlogCFC is to add a post.cfm page. The blog entry url is different between MangoBlog and BlogCFC. BlogCFC includes the post date as part of the url. MangoBlog just uses the alias. I only realised this when I noticed that Google Analytics was showing a complete lack of traffic. The post.cfm page I've created looks up the entry by alias, rebuilds the URL and does a cflocation to the correct url using statuscode 302, permanent redirect. I've attached the code that I used to talk to the Blogger Data API. This also includes the ORM set up for most of MangoBlog. The blogger stuff is all over the place, because I abandoned it, but it might be useful to someone. Feel free to use and abuse to your hearts content. I've given the code I wrote to Ray Camden, so you never know, at some point, a cleaned up version of it may find its way into the new installer. Now maybe I can get back to the blog round-up!! ;-)

Blog Round up 20 September 2009

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:49:00 -0700

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.

Its Really Really REALLY important that you read this post by Mark Kruger on Script Injection Attacks. You should also read Ray Camden's "How Galleon was Hacked" post.
Read, inwardly digest and then go away and make sure that none of your applications are vunerable to this form of attack and that you've applied updated to all your third party applications to be sure that they are patched against. It can affect anyone (This link may give you a malware warning, but the site is now clean and clear) and everyone.

Congratulations to Liz Frederick who has joined Adobe Developer Relations team as Community Manager. Liz previously worked for Stellr and Teratech and was key in the organisation of CFUnited in the US and Europe.

While I'm tangentially mentioning conferences, Scotch on the Road European tour is rapidly running out of tickets. Last tweet I saw from Andy said that there was only one ticket left for Amsterdam. Tickets are Free and Terrence Ryan and Adam Lehman will be in attendance! Can you afford not to go? ;)

If you're going to be at the Amsterdam session, would you be interested in 2 days of ColdBox Training?
Kev McCabe also asks what would you like to see at Scotch on the Rocks 2010. Help the guys out to make SOTR the conference that you want it to be.

I mentioned previously a post by Ray Camden on Web Charts Editor. While doing some research on ColdBox Ray came across the editor as a plugin for Eclipse, which is pretty cool. Check it out....

I haven't had time to read them all, but there's been a flurry of CF9 ORM/Hibernate posts this last week or so. Looks like great minds and all that.. ;)
Anyway, here's a quick list of those posts.

Some thoughts on ColdFusion 9 ORM and Persistent CFCs - Ray Camden
A New Series: Hibernate & ColdFusion 9
Hibernate & ColdFusion 9 - What is ORM?

ColdFusion 9 ORM on Tomcat Gotcha
Jeff Chastain at Alagad
CF9 ORM - Experimenting with type vs ormtype - Bob Silverberg
Introspecting Application.cfc (how do I know if ORM is enabled?)
ColdFusion 9 ORM: Data Mapper versus Active Record
Terrence Ryan

On the subject of ORM Tom de Manincor has released an update to TransferSync to allow synchronising between multiple instances on the same server.

To close up this round-up, I mentioned last time that I've upgraded to MangoBlog 1.4, but didn't mention that verision 1.4 has only recently been updated. Here's a post by Marcos Placona of the new features and some important notes for Railo users.

With this new skin and the new version of MangoBlog, plus a recent outting to FOWD in glasgow I've started trying to use microformats on my links. I'm not sure they really do that much or are that meaningful, but I want to have a play around with them to see what the deal is. Feel free to tell me to stop it if the outcome is unwanted. Next I need to go take some photos around Newcastle and get these header images more relevant to me.

MangoBlog Plugin: TinyMCE Manager

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 05:38:54 -0700

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.

Catch up

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:46:37 -0700

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.

Great addition to Mango Blog : FeedPing

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:30:32 -0700

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!

Upgraded to MangoBlog 1.0

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:46:51 -0700

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.

theme_advanced_buttons2 : "blockquote,pasteword,fullscreen,preview",

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.

First Post with Mango Blog

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:38:57 -0700

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.