We’re starting to compile a list of internal tools used when developing a FarCry application. I thought it might be simpler to create a small FarCry plugin to keep them all in the same place, makes it easier to use across multiple projects. The plugin currently contains 2 scripts: FarCry database diff (MySQL only at this stage) Content Object Meta The database diff looks for case-sensitivity differences between your ColdFusion components and the actual MySQL table names (MySQL only). ... Read more

All system content objects (and those custom types which extend “types” or “versions” etc) in FarCry have the “label” and “title” properties. Most of the time the value of these are identical, I find myself typically using the “title” property in formtools as well as any display methods. The question of course is why have both these if they’re always exactly the same? A note on the FarCry forums suggested that this was a handy way split what you might want to use in a display method vs an admin screen or any other scenario etc. ... Read more

I ran into an issue today while working on a FarCry project, basically when I opened up the “Related Content” popup from the WYSIWYG editor it was blank. Nothing. Not the usual tabs for Images, File, Flash etc. The Railo logs were empty but Apache was throwing a strange error which I hadn’t seen before: “Couldn’t initialize from remote server, JRun server(s) probably down.”. Funny as I’m not even using JRun! ... Read more

A new project we’re working has the need to categorise each new content object, for this we use the built in FarCry category/keyword formtool. By default the render type is a multi-select tree, I wanted a single select dropdown. Luckily formtools makes this oh so simple. <cfproperty name="catHTML" type="nstring" required="true" default="" ftSeq="2" ftwizardStep="Content" ftValidation="required" ftFieldset="General Details" ftLabel="Categories" ftType="Category" ftAlias="sections" ftRenderType="dropdown" ftSelectSize="1" ftSelectMultiple="false" ftAliasAsOptGroup="true"> Note that I’ve set the dropdown size to 1 and multiple select to false. ... Read more

After you install FarCry you must make sure to delete the “install” folder(s) that FarCry leaves behind. Otherwise it’s possible for anyone to access the installer wizard again from your production website, and as it’s the installer they don’t even need to be logged in to cause real havoc. Not good. By default, as of FarCry 6.1.x, there are 2 install folders to delete: farcry.core.webtop.install farcry.plugins.farcrycms.install

For years here at Learnosity we’ve been using FarCry for most of our CMS requirements (yes, I know that FarCry, or rather farcrycms, is a lot more than just a CMS). For one reason or another we decided it was time to look at some of the other options for content management in the ColdFusion sphere, Mura CMS was a likely candidate for evalutation. We had a small-ish site that was already running in FarCry 6+ which we wanted to port to Mura so we could really get a feel for how things worked in Mura-land. ... Read more

I spent a couple of hours on a FarCry plugin for twitter yesterday based off their official API. What? This plugin basically wraps up the options that the offical twitter API gives you including: Twitter username Showing avatars, timestamps, hashtags etc Theme appearance (colours for background and text etc Dimensions of widget For more, visit the project page, download it and have a play. Why? Although the twitter API is super simple to implement, it’s always handy to have things wrapped up as a plugin so we can easily create as many widgets as we need and handle caching etc. ... Read more

We run several FarCry projects at Learnosity and all of them run on Linux. We have occasionally come across issues where the FarCry codebase will refer to a MySQL table in the wrong “case”. E.g. referring to “dmhtml” where the actual table name is “dmHTML”. This is course fails in any case sensitive environment. Note that we also run our Macs as case sensitive in development to help find these issues before deploying to a stage/production server. ... Read more

The folks at Daemon have completed some migrations with their subversion repositories which directly effects FarCry. Notes from the farcry-dev groups: All URL’s should be replaced with this repo location: https://modius.svn.cvsdude.com/farcry All project folders are relative to this root. For example, the p520 branch for FarCry 5.2.x is available here: https://modius.svn.cvsdude.com/farcry/core/branches/p520/ You can re-checkout or use the “relocate” command if your SVN client supports.

Came across this nice tip a little while ago from AJ Mercer on the farcry-dev group. It hides the FarCry “tray” which is visible on the front end of your website to users who are logged in to FarCry. I happen to have a use case for this at the moment so it was good timing. Simply put this code snippet in any template there you don’t want the tray appearing. ... Read more