Installed FarCry Tonight: First Impressions
Posted by
Brad Wood
Aug 19, 2008 08:27:00 UTC
I had a little time tonight to download and install FarCry 5.0.0 to play around. I mainly just wanted to see how it worked and what all you can do with it. It seems a lot of people complain that it is too complicated. I guess I'll see for myself.I read through the installation instructions online first, and then downloaded the zip file. Over 11 megs zipped! That's pretty big. I uploaded the zip to my server and ran the unzip command. A chown and chmod later I navigated to my subdirectory only to receive a big error message. "Your IP address (123.123.123.123) is not permitted to access the install directory." The cfthrow provides a detail message that tells you how to rectify the problem, but the default ColdFusion error screen does not show the detail message, so fat lot of good it does you.
A quick Google and I was on my way. (I added my IP to the application.cfm file in /[projectname]/www/install/Application.cfm)
There was a pretty clean installation wizard that walked me through the basic steps. I created my datasource ahead of time. I wish it had given me a list of my datasources in a dropdown, but I guess that would have required the CF Admin password to use the Admin API. Also, I don't remember being asked for the username to the default user it created for me.
Personal pet peeve-- the login screen doesn't place focus in the username field. It could also remember the last user you logged in as. There is a "forgot my password" feature. That's pretty nice. There's some weird CSS thing going on in IE7 that's making my page jump when I hover over the link though. Oops, there's also a broken link. The Login link seems to have forgotten I did a subfolder install.
Well, it looks promising. There's a bunch of features floating around in here. I've already hit a couple errors though. Also, I'm not quite following the "quick zoom" menu under the site tab. When I click on "hidden" I get "utility", and when I click on "rubish", I get "trash". I do like the pretty context menus that are used.
Well, it took about 4 tries and some guessing, but I finally got a test tab added to the site. I don't understand why my new tab shows up UNDER the Home item in the tree, when it displays at the same level as the home tab on the design. I also don't understand why after selecting "create" > "Navigation" I STILL had to re-choose "navigation" in the "Type webskin" drop down. Didn't I already tell it? And what in tarnation is a webskin? That drop down is a little scary right now, but hopefully I'll figure out everything in it later.
Hmm, the search feature included on my default skin doesn't appear to do anything. When I click search I get redirected our of my folder to the top most /index.cfm.
Oooh, I like the security stuff. It looks pretty robust. Truthfully, probably too much for a lot of people, but that's fine as long as you can just use the pieces you want.
One thing I've noticed, some of the admin pages aren't very snappy. I don't know if my server is just getting bogged down or what, but some of the pages in the site admin take a second or two to pop up.
Well, off to bed for now. I'll report back as I poke around some more to see what I can figure out.
Tags: ColdFusion, General
Michael Sharman
Hi Brad,
Welcome to FarCry!
The "Quick Zoom" option allows you to focus on a certain area of the site tree which you may be working on. This is particularly handy if you are looking at a nested area of the site, you don't want the clutter of the entire site tree getting in your way...just the area you're working on. Probably not much use to you until you have a sizable number of navigation nodes and levels.
The navigation tree is a heirachical representation of your site, so "home" is the first element. Think of it as "root". The default skeleton which ships with the FarCry install (Mollio) is simply adding a "home" nav link as many sites do. It doesn't mean that the 2 links (home and support) are at the same level.
Think of webskins as "templates" for your pages. These are what the content editors will use as a template (or webskin) to format the look and feel of a page. Although FarCry ships with some default webskins, developers always add their own webskins to match the design and solution of any particular project. Have a look in your project -> webskin -> dmHTML folder for examples.
Remember that FarCry is extremely powerful and flexible. With this comes an obvious learning curve. It's well worth the effort though as you can build extremely complex sites in no time with all the built in tools of the "framework".
Also remember that what you get out of the box, while impressive, is really only the tip of the iceberg. FarCry encourages developers to extend and add to the out of the box features and makes it easy to do so.
Check out the 3 FarCry groups on google (dev, beta and user) for more discussions.
Brad Wood
@Michael: thanks for the info on FarCry. I've been flipping through the documentation wikis at http://docs.farcrycms.org/dashboard.action and there's a lot of good stuff in there.
I'll admit, I've been a little overwhelmed by all the stuff FarCry has in it and it hasn't all been exceedingly intuitive. I was messing around with FarCry in part to see if it would work for my church web site. Unfortunately, I'm afraid it's a little over the heads of the people who actually maintain the sites. Unless, there's a way to dumb down the interface and hide the non-applicable stuff... I'll have to see what the security model can do for me. 00
I've also run into a number of errors while browsing around-- broken links, JavaScript, and CF. Perhaps the 5.0.0 is just too new to have all those kinks worked out. Regardless, I will keep playing with it. The more I do-- the more sense it will all make. :)
ike
Hey Brad, I was looking for a "contact me" or similar link on the blog here to send this, 'cause I didn't want to be seen as "poaching" or trying to steal the comments or anything... But I'm always interested in frameworks (and comparing them). After all, I'm an author of a couple now and I did write the Galleon Forum Ports ( http://on.tapogee.com/galleonproject ).
I'd also heard mixed messages about FarCry either that it's very easy to use or that it's a real challenge to get it running. I haven't tried it myself with recent versions.
I'm interested to know from someone who's less familiar with FarCry how the learning curve compares to my own framework. If you've got a few minutes to check out the installation video on the new site http://on.tapogee.com and maybe try downloading and installing it, I'd really appreciate your feedback. Thanks. :)
p.s. I believe the latest core components for the onTap framework are about 3MB and then there's another 300-500kb in the DataFaucet install and in the Members onTap plugin. But in theory you should only need to download the core framework archive, because the plugin manager will download and install the other 2 via webservice.
Brad Wood
@ike: The only link to the "contact me" page was if you clicked my name in the footer. I adeed a link to main navigation. :)
For the record, my E-mail is brad {a} codersrevolution.com
I will give onTap a spin this week to see what it does.
ike
Oh duh... "Blog Owner: Brad Wood". It's so obvious now that you mention it. :)
Thanks for adding the contact link at the top and for the forthcoming feedback, much appreciated. :)
I've started partitioning email for the frameworks to info(a)tapogee.com or info(a)datafaucet.com respectively instead of my personal primary email address info(a)turnkey.to ... The plan is that once more people are involved I can reassign those email addresses to "evangelists" as the primary points of contact.
Mark Ireland
Brad, FarCry is not too complicated, it is feature rich and feature heavy.
Do you think there is room in the market for a light weight version?
RD
It seems to me you experience has prooved that FarCry is pretty compicated. Maybe this will help to understand more about FC:http://www.videorolls.com/watch/FarCry-Google-Maps-Plugin . As for me, I do not like it. It has too many shortages.