yet another coldfusion blog

One of the first issues developers encounter when building a plugin for the Mura CMS is in finding a place to store data. It is possible to create a script for adding tables to the Mura site's datasource, or even generating the tables for a completely separate datasource, but often that is a level of complexity that just isn't needed or desired. There are other options, such as flat files or XML documents, but they have their own issues and aren't always scalable or search-friendly.

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In part II of Advanced Plugin Development for the Mura CMS we looked at a basic FW/1 plugin framework that used SubSystems as display objects.  In Part III we are going to discuss integrating a datasource and ColdSpring into your plugin.  This datasource could be one that is completely separate from your Mura DSN, or it could involve custom tables within the Mura DSN itself.

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Okay, so the more I thought about what I was trying to achieve with this tutorial, the more I realized I was committing a cardinal sin: using an overly complex example to illustrate a fairly complex problem.  So, I'm going to step back a bit on the whole "learn advanced plugin development by studying a complex plugin" thing and instead build a tutorial plugin with various levels of "hello world" functionality.  The previously mentioned complex plugin (Meld Gallery) will still be coming ... it's looking pretty good, by the way ... but we'll be working with something a lot simpler here.

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A key component of nearly every Mura CMS plugin is the use of Display Objects to render content on a given page. In regular Display Objects, the content is generated by a CFC method or ColdFusion page, but one drawback has been that it's been difficult to get the same Display Object display different sets of information. You've been able to use extended attributes, but this is a complicated and non-friendly UX way of doing things.

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This year's CFUnited was an eye-opener in many ways. Presentation-wise, there were some valuable insights into other frameworks and methodologies. The stuff I learned outside the presentations was equally valuable; there's nothing like getting to chat with people who's work you use every day, and to give/get real-time feedback.

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