ColdFusion 9 hosting on hold!

We regret to inform our customers that we have placed our Windows ColdFusion 9 services on hold for the time being due to issues with Windows supporting the control panel we wanted to use. We maybe going for Linux with CF9 in a few weeks time but we must look at our approach to this services in a new light.

We will update everyone as soon as we have news on this matter, a blog post will be published to see peoples interest in CF9 on Linux within the next hour.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Best regards

Host Media UK Team

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Tip: Preview your Railo/CF site without changing the main DNS for your domain.

We have been getting many emails saying what’s the best way to preview their website before changing the main sites DNS / A:Records over… Well we have found a simple but easy way to preview websites, its as simple as creating a sub domain. Just like a full domain name a sub domain can be pointed to our Railo servers in the US and we can then add it to the service. (Example below)

What we see:

<Host name=”#domain.com#” appBase=”webapps”
unpackWARs=”true” autoDeploy=”true”
xmlValidation=”false” xmlNamespaceAware=”false”>
<Context path=”" docBase=”/home/#username#/#domain.com#/” />
<Alias>#www.domain.com#</Alias>
<Alias>#subdomain.com#</Alias>
</Host>

Key:
Grey: Standard host text we add when we get a new order
Black: What we add for your sub domain to work on the main domain

So in conclusion with your current domain owner or hosting provider you will need to create a sub domain name, anything you would like (Example: railo.yourdomain.com) and point it to own Railo IP which is in your ‘Welcome Account Information’.

If you have any questions or would like to get more information please contact our support team via the support ticket.

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Railo Server Upgrade

Over the past few days we have been testing our new upgrades to our Railo servers in Washington and preparing for even more upgrades to the servers within the next 2 months.

The main update to the servers have been the CPU power to allow for better handling of Railo, with this increase in performance power more powerful ColdFusion & Railo scripts can be run without decrease in server speed.

Many of our customers have already notices an increase in script speeds and with the future upgrades planned we hope to have the very best Railo hosting servers out today.

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ColdFusion pagination with next, previous and numbers

One of the main things all developers come to in applications is pagination and the best way we found to do this is by Raymond Camden which covers how to create next and previous buttons for your content using the URL variable.

As we have extended what Raymond Camden has done we will go through all the code again to make sure you get the full picture.

First part is to get our data, which most of the time will be a database or as the second data example shows a queryNew which is a way of creating data in a query format without the need of a database query.

<cfquery name=”data” datasource=”data_dsn”>

SELECT *
</cfquery>

OR

<cfset data = queryNew(“id,name,age,active”,”integer,varchar,integer,bit”)>

<cfloop index=”x” from=”1″ to=”22″>
<cfset queryAddRow(data)>

<cfset querySetCell(data,”id”,x)>
<cfset querySetCell(data,”name”,”User #x#”)>
<cfset querySetCell(data,”age”,randRange(20,90))>

<cfset querySetCell(data,”active”,false)>


</cfloop>

Next we want to set the number of records per page we would like to show, for this example code we are using 10:

<cfset perpage = 10>

Now we create the code for the URL variables which counts the records in the data we have got from our database / query. We also set the default of the variable URL.start to 1 as we want to start from the first record and not 0.

<cfparam name=”url.start” default=”1″>

<cfif not isNumeric(url.start) or url.start lt 1 or url.start gt data.recordCount or round(url.start) neq url.start>
<cfset url.start = 1>
</cfif>

The output of the data, you will notice on our <cfoutput> tag we have startrow & maxrows which sets what records are displayed.

<cfoutput query=”data” startrow=”#url.start#” maxrows=”#perpage#”>
#currentrow#) #name#<br />
</cfoutput>

And now this is when the code that Raymond Camden created changes a little to add in a new feature, page numbering. We first have a previous link which has an if statement around it to see if its a link or not and enable the <a> tag or have no link on it. This can be done different ways but to keep with Raymond Camden’s code we will leave it as it is. Now the new part you can see within the commented area (<!— Start Page Number —> CODE <!— End Page Number —>) we set 2 variables one for a page count as we need to have a number of pages that will be listed. The next one is page link, this is to fit in with the rest of the code and add the number that will need to be added within the link to view the numbered page. Next is a loop to go through the number of pages with the link and a small bit of VERY simple maths to add up the next page through the loop.

<p align=”center”>

[

<cfif url.start gt 1>

<cfset link = cgi.script_name & "?start=" & (url.start - perpage)>

<cfoutput><a href="#link#">Previous Page</a></cfoutput>

<cfelse>

Previous Page

</cfif>

/

<!--- Start Page Number --->

<cfset pageCount = 1>
<cfset pageLink = 1>

<cfset totalPages = Ceiling(rs_getReports.recordCount / perpage)>

<cfloop index="c" from="1" to="#totalPages#">

<cfoutput>

<a href="?start=#pageLink#">#pageCount#</a>

</cfoutput>

<cfset pageCount = pageCount + 1>

<cfset pageLink = pageLink + perpage>

</cfloop>

<!--- End Page Number --->

/

<cfif (url.start + perpage - 1) lt rs_getReports.recordCount>

<cfset link = cgi.script_name & "?start=" & (url.start + perpage)>

<cfoutput><a href="#link#">Next Page</a></cfoutput>

<cfelse>

Next Page

</cfif>

]

</p>

Thats it, you will now have something that looks like this:

Paging
Base code taken from Raymond Camden’s coldfusionjedi.com :

http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2006/4/24/ColdFusion-and-Pagination

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Polar CMS in alpha testing

After 3 months of development first staging of the Polar CMS script has been released to our testers / designers to start playing with.

Process of our testing

  • Running the install program to setup the databases and user accounts
  • Use the basic functions of the CMS:
    - Add pages

    - Add page elements to change

    - Use the WYSIWYG editor
    - Apply code to front end site to test speeds

  • Consult with development team to see how things can be improved
website soon with some of this information. Also a new website will be released soon.

Visit polarcms.com

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Using ColdFusion Custom Tags (cf_)

A new part of ColdFusion our development team has been looking into more is the custom tags (cf_). Soon to be used with the Polar CMS (Visit official site), custom tags allow you to have scripts and coding within a tag that can be called from a cfm page as shown below:

<!— CFM Page (cfcustomtag_caller.cfm)—>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<title>Call Tag</title>
</head>

<body>
<cf_cfcustomtag customVar=”test”>
<p>SOME HTML</p>

<cf_cfcustomtag form=”testFormCode”>
</body>
</html>

As you can see we are using a new tag <cf_cfcustomtag> with custom variables (customVar=”test”). These variables can be picked up within our custom tag cfm file we are about to create.

<!— CFM Page (cfcustomtag.cfm)—>
<cfoutput>
<cfif isDefined(“ATTRIBUTES.customVar”)>
<h1>#Now()#</h1>
<p>#ATTRIBUTES.customVar#</p>

</cfif>
<cfif isDefined(“ATTRIBUTES.form”)>

<p>#ATTRIBUTES.form#</p>
</cfif>
</cfoutput>

The above is a simple CFM file which has HTML and ColdFusion code. As you will notice we have named the file ‘cfcustomtag.cfm’ which is the same name as the tag: <cf_cfcustomtag> just without the cf_ at the start. Coldfusion will look for any files with the same naming tag.

You may ask why not use a <cfinclude> tag, but with cfincludes they can be slower and you are not able to reuse the cfinclude as easy as a cf_ custom tag. With custom tags you can lower the amount of code you need by using the extra variables (ATTRIBUTES).

Hope you enjoy using custom cf_ tags. Feel free to comment and add your code to show better ways of using cf_ tags. You may also want to research <cfmodule> tags.

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Detecting iPhone, Blackberry etc using ColdFusion

Many of our clients have been asking about detecting if a user is using a blackberry or iPhone etc to view their website and redirect to a mobile version of their websites. Well we have put together a little bit of code to do this:

Code example:

<cfif findNoCase('blackberry', CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT)>
<cflocation url="http://blackberry.yourdomain.com" addtoken="no">
<cfelseif findNoCase('iphone', CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT)>
<cflocation url="http://iphone.yourdomain.com" addtoken="no">
<cfelseif CGI.HTTP_ACCEPT CONTAINS "text/vnd.wap.wml">
<cflocation url="http://wap.yourdomain.com" addtoken="no">
</cfif>

Hope you enjoy this code snippet.

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Corporate Site Re-Design

AeonCube Networks Re-Design

Over the past 3 months the AeonCube Network team has been designing, developing and researching a new website design for the top level of our network.

We are very happy to say this has now been finished and with only small after live amends to be finished the site is running online now.

The new site comes with more features and better user interface to allow our customers / clients to login and access their brought products.

As well as the new design we are proud to say we have upgraded our US Linux ColdFusion from 7 to 8 so we hope to use some of the great features from ColdFusion 8 with the site.

More features are planned for the website in the near future such as more paid items to be downloadable and paid through the website.

Hope you enjoy the new design, please visit: http://www.aeoncubenetworks.com/

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Using Coldfusion tag: CFFEED

Using the ‘cffeed’ allows you to read any websites RSS feed and display it within your coldfusion page. The ‘cffeed’ tag is a very easy tag to use and can be very handy when building a RSS display website.

Code to be placed at the top of .cfm page:

<cffeed action=”read” source=”http://www.hostmediauk.com/blog/?feed=rss2″ name=”myRSSFeed”>

Code to be placed within the <body> tags:

<cfloop from=”1″ to=”#ArrayLen(myRSSFeed.item)#” index=”i”>

<cfoutput>
#myRSSFeed.item[i].description.value#<br />
</cfoutput>

</cfloop>

You can view this working on our Coldfusion 8 servers in the UK at:
http://www.hostcoldfusion.co.uk/

Enjoy using RSS feeds on your website.

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