Really simple CMS with FW/1 and ColdFusion ORM
I recently wanted to create a simple, lightweight Content Managed site and decided to use FW/1 and of course ColdFusion's excellent ORM capabilities.
FW/1 is incredibly easy to get started with, you just need to download a single cfc and get Application.cfc to extend it.
As my site will have dynamic pages which can be added or deleted at any time, then I don't want to have to create specific views and controllers (as I don't know what the pages are yet!), luckily F/W1 has a onMissingView method which is called when a view is not found.
In the onMissingView I'm going use EntityLoad to get the page content from the database. To do that I'll need the define my Content object.
/**
* I am the Content object which maps to the contents database table
*/
component persistent="true" table="contents"
{
property name="id" column="content_id" generator="native";
property name="guid" column="content_guid"; // used for pretty urls
property name="title" column="content_title";
property name="content" column="content_content";
}
I'll need a view page to show the page content stored in the database.
<!---
views/content.cfm
I'm a simple view to display CMS content
--->
<cfoutput>
<h1>#rc.Content.getTitle()#</h1>
#rc.Content.getContent()#
</cfoutput>
It's a good idea to trap any requests to pages that no longer exist, so we need a 404 page.
<!---
views/notfound.cfm
I'm a simple 404 view
--->
<cfoutput>
<h1>Page Not found</h1>
<p>Sorry, the page you requested (#getFullyQualifiedAction()#) has not been found.</p>
<cfoutput>
A layout would be kinda useful!
<!---
layouts/default.cfm
I am the default layout
--->
<cfoutput>
<html>
<head>
<title>#rc.Content.getTitle()#</title>
</head>
<body>
<ul id="nav">
<cfloop array="#rc.menu#" index="local.thispage">
<li><a href="#buildURL( local.thispage.getGuid() )#">#local.thispage.getTitle()#</a>
</cfloop>
</ul>
<div id="content">#body#</div>
</body>
</html>
</cfoutput>
Now we need to set up the Application.cfc
component extends="org.corfield.framework"
{
APPLICATION_ROOT = GetDirectoryFromPath( GetCurrentTemplatePath() );
this.name = ReReplace( UCase( APPLICATION_ROOT ), "[^A-Z]", "", "all" );
this.mappings["/model"] = APPLICATION_ROOT & "model";
// ORM Setttings
this.datasource = "simplecms";
this.ormenabled = true;
this.ormSettings.flushAtRequestEnd = false;
this.ormSettings.cfclocation = this.mappings["/model"];
// FW/1 Setttings
variables.framework = {
generateSES = true
};
// executes when a view is not found
any function onMissingView( required rc )
{
var filter = {
guid = getFullyQualifiedAction()
};
rc.Content = EntityLoad( "Content", filter, true );
if ( !IsNull( rc.Content ) )
{
// use the content view to display content
return view( 'content' );
}
else
{
// create a 404 response header
var pc = getpagecontext().getresponse();
pc.getresponse().setstatus( 404 );
// set the page title
rc.Content = EntityNew( "Content" );
rc.Content.setTitle( "Page Not Found" );
// display the 404 page
return view( 'notfound' );
}
}
// executes per request
void function setupRequest()
{
// get all pages for the navigation
rc.menu = EntityLoad( "Content" );
}
}
Finally, we need to create a blank index.cfm file in the application root. Now when you hit a URL such as; http://localhost/simplecms/index.cfm/my-new-page. You'll get the 404 page. If you add a page to your database with the content_guid field set to "my-new-page.default", it will magically appear.
Obviously my application is more complex than this, but I thought it would be a good example of how simple it is to build a fairly powerful system quickly in ColdFusion and I haven't mentioned a beanFactory once!
- Posted in:
- ColdFusion
- FW/1
What I find interesting is the fact that FW/1 accomplishes what it does while remaining just a single file. A sleek nutcracker to Hibernate's sledgehammer. But as your code shows, CF can do most of the heavy lifting and wielding of that sledgehammer for you.
Comment by Julian Halliwell – May 23, 2011
I could have made use of Service layers etc, but I really don't see the point for a simple app like this and the API for cf-orm is so nice :)
Comment by John Whish – May 24, 2011