Lessons in customizing BlogCFC

After debating for a couple days and trying out Blogger.com and WordPress.com, I have finally decided to use BlogCFC from Raymond Camden. Thanks Ray.

Adam Lapsley @ Lapsley Media set me up with great CF hosting. Thanks Adam. If you are looking for expert ColdFusion development and hosting in further-down-from-down-under, i.e., in New Zealand, you might want to have a chat with Adam.

There were a couple of interesting things I had to do with BlogCFC to get it to go.

• I wanted to use the styles from my earlier blog at Blogger.com. Customizing BlogCFC was fairly painless. Having said that, it did take a couple of hours.
• I didn’t want to use index.cfm as the default document. I know I could have continued to use index.cfm, but default.cfm was what I wanted to use! To get this going, I had to do a search and replace on all instances of index.cfm with default.cfm. There a couple of places where the code was looking for the last nine characters (number of characters in index.cfm). I had to change itto look for 11 characters (for default.cfm).It would be interesting to see how long it will take to use a new version of BlogCFC as references to “index.cfm” as the default document are hard-coded at quite a few places.
• I wanted to not use the search-engine safe (SES) urls. (I don’t know if that term continues to hold meaning as spidering engines now seem to be intelligent enough to follow query strings.) Changing that was as simple as deleting values in “alias” column in tblBlogCategories and tblBlogEntries.
• I wanted to pass username and password in all the tags. Again, I had to do a search and replace to add these attributes to the tag.

All in all, it was fairly straightforward to customize BlogCFC to look as well as behave the way I wanted to! Nice 🙂

Now that I’m all setup, I can devote my energy to posting the sample Cairngorm contacts application on the blog. See my previous blog entry for more on this.