ASP/Coldfusion CMS

GoneShootin

Can anyone recommend a good ASP/Coldfusion CMS? I'm denied PHP as I'm limited to a Windows server...

seamus

GoneShootin wrote:

Can anyone recommend a good ASP/Coldfusion CMS? I'm denied PHP as I'm limited to a Windows server...

Any good reason why they/you can't/won't install PHP on IIS?

Have it working fine here...

GoneShootin

Kinda - the server is a freebie from a former employer, and I doubt they would go to the hassle of installing PHP on it for me. This is a site I'll be doing for a local tennis club. You know the way, always wanting everything for nothing!

EDIT

w00t - PHP does indeed seem to be installed

http://www.michaelrea.com/test.php

The question remains tho - just in case I ever need to go away from PHP. For PHP mind I assume its still Mambo/Typo3 etc?

steve-hosting36

Yep, altho most require MySQL database is available too...

rsynnott

ColdFusion? COLDFUSION?! Doe that still exist?

PhantomBeaker

rsynnott wrote:

ColdFusion? COLDFUSION?! Doe that still exist?

Unfortunately, yes, yes it does. See: http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/ - It's generally given out as part of the Studio suite. Hence the webdev people that know that Dreamweaver and Flash are good things automatically assume that all of the stuff is good, and that ColdFusion must be the server to use. (Plus, I can't remember if Dreamweaver has a thing for it itself)

OT: In fact, we have a client that requires the use of Coldfusion... given the minor fact that we're an internet society that doesn't want to shell out for a CF licence, we found a product called BlueDragon (http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/index.cfm) that seems to do the trick, although it appears to be a minor beast of a thing, and requires such things as J2EE to run it.... however the basic version is free Thus we it is the one we will wrangle with

As for good scripts (Regardless of the language you use - it even has CFML if you're so inclined), I find http://www.hotscripts.com/ is decent enough. If I'm lazy it's the first site I look at... otherwise google is my friend.

(By the way, it's generally recommended that a page that calls phpinfo() is not a good thing to have publicly viewable - it's brilliant for diagnostics, but on the downside... it's brilliant for diagnostics)

As for databases and other crap, I find that www.devside.net has a really nice suite for windows... basically Apache, perl, php, mysql and a coupla useful tools for all of the above.

Anyway, good luck with the site,
P.B.

rsynnott

PhantomBeaker wrote:

Unfortunately, yes, yes it does. See: http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/ - It's generally given out as part of the Studio suite. Hence the webdev people that know that Dreamweaver and Flash are good things automatically assume that all of the stuff is good,

Is any of their stuff good?

PhantomBeaker

Well, I like dreamweaver. It's essentially an IDE for any markup language or scripting language you care to use - and it does good validation. The WYSIWYG isn't half-bad. And the bit I love the best is - it provides you with e-books of O'Reilly reference material - so you can look up Javascript functions and the like. Or you can look up xhtml elements that you're unsure of, and then you can even look at what attributes are valid to assign to those elements.

So, Dreamweaver is fine. And as for Flash - well, you're not going to get a better Flash editor/compiler, what with it being proprietry software and the like. (Oh, man, I so want to see SVG and Javascript become a good flash-killer at some point! Hell, there's even SVG/JS/DOM tetris out already - you can get the mozilla/firefox version that supports SVG at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg and have a look at their links at the bottom for SVG tetris) Their Freehand and Fireworks products are brilliant - if you can't do something with one of them, you can damn well do it in the other (and yes, they are designed for different purposes, Fireworks for web images, and Freehand for vector images), and any object that you create in Fireworks/Freehand/Flash can be copied via clipboard from one to the other, and it will work fine. So if you want to create very special-looking buttons for flash (at one point I tried making my CV in Flash - Wow I'm a nerd), you can create them in fireworks as a button and copy it over to Flash.

So, yeah, they've got my respect... and it's never crashed on me.

P.B.

rsynnott

Ah, right. I suppose I wouldn't be too keen then, given my "all flash 'artists' to be painfully executed" policy, then

PhantomBeaker

How come? If it's done sensibly Flash is pretty decent. They release plugins for all major OSs and browsers. Last I heard, they program for the wine library as opposed to the win32 library (subtle difference being that if it's programmed based on the wine library, you can run it in wine AND win32 with little hassle - it's a good cross platform step... they don't write for linux or any unix in particular, but if you can run wine you can run it).

Now, bear in mind, I said, if it's done SENSIBLY - i.e. you know how to code half-decently and have laid your objects out for reuse, then it reduces to a relatively ok size. HOWEVER, if it's a got lots of big bitmaps, a large chunk of mpg or mp3 just with some flash stuff wrapped around it, then it sucks... a LOT. (good examples of both can be found on newgrounds.com :P ) In the good ones, the vector graphics compress well (what with them being vector graphics) and scale really smoothly, and you can get good tiny files... even if you use a little bit of sound (sparingly)

That said, the debugger/IDE is a royal pain in flash though, which discourages programming sensibly and just to run what doesn't generate an error.

And being on dialup I tend to avoid anywhere with a .swf embedded (generally because they can't do it well). Hmph, I think I just defeated my own argument, and see the point of yours It's not the technology that sucks, it's the people that use it.

Take care
Phantom Beaker (Who really should start signing off with a real name at SOME point )

rsynnott

The only legitimate use is for fun cartoons. Flash-based websites are uniformly awful, and flash navigation thingies are even worse.