Alagad Ally - Web Development Task Force

I am part owner of another web company, which shall remain unnamed.  A few years ago I (and a couple others) wrote their current web application.  Initially the application was sufficient, but over time we’ve run into some limitations …

As Scott has been blogging here, we recently released a new Alagad.com website built ontop of Farcry.  The thing is, since we released the site we have been  having intermitant problems with errors cropping up in the admin interface which simply say "corrupt table".  We quickly discovered a few points about this:

1. There are no corrupt tables.  Or, more to the point, our data in our database was not corrupt.
2. If you restart ColdFusion the errors went away.

I initially assumed this was a but with Farcry and put it on my list of things to fix.  Today I spent some time actually looking into the problem and, after trying to rewrite a part of the Farcry core, I realised that Farcry has nothing to do with this.  It turns out to be a bug in ColdFusion 8.
I found a discussion related to this on the Adobe forums.

In previous articles we discussed how to extend the native FarCry objects and how to create a form to manage these new objects.  Today we will discuss what we modified to allow users to see the form. 

Since we needed to use a new form for users to update their profile, and we wanted it to appear in the main content area rather than in a pop-up window, we needed to not only modify the menu, but some files in the core code. Whenever you are customizing or extending native FarCry objects, you should avoid modifying any code in the ‘core’.  Any code you modify in the core can, and most likely will, be overwritten with any updates to the code base.

Since Doug announced that he was working on an XML-RPC connector for the Alagad Team Blog, I’ve been dying for him to let us know that something workable was ready so we could try it out. Today he let us Alagad bloggers know that it was up and running, so I wanted to give it a try.

At the moment, I’m using Contribute, which seems to be the easiest tool for this particular task and while I haven’t yet tried to publish anything, at the moment I’m pretty impressed… it’s WAY easier than using the FarCry UI to try to publish blog content. We’ll see if my enthusiasm sticks around when I try to publish something that contains code snippets.

For the moment, though, I just want to say "Hey, Doug, lookin good!"

The other day, I discussed how we extended the dmProfile FarCry object so that we could add more properties.  Today, I am going to discuss how we used this object’s properties to be able to create a form that will easily allow users to edit the extra information we needed to save. This is a slightly different approach than you might take for other custom content types as most custom content types would be editable like any other content.

First, let me throw out a disclaimer.  What we did may not necessarily be considered ‘best practices’, but it did solve the problem we were having. Also, this form is only being used in the admin and allows administrators to update their profile.  That being said, let’s get to it.