Glyn Jackson's Web Design and ColdFusion Blog - Mura (Sava)

Mura: Creating Nice Friendly URL's and remove Site ID

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:36:00 +0100

UPDATE: Starting in Mura 5.2 you can now simply set your /config/settings.ini.cfm siteIDInURLs attribute to 0.

The good people who created Mura have already provided a number of ways to rewrite URL's but if you have never done this within Sava finding the correct information on their website can be tedious. Below is a step by step guide taken from various posts and the readme file within the Sava download.

These instructions work on Coldfusion 8 server, I have not tested it on anything else so I don't want to comment on the other methods. For more information download Sava or visit the Sava website

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Sava: no ALT Attributes in Gallery

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 23:22:00 +0100

The galleries created in Sava do not produce any alt text on the images. I dont see anywhere in Sava where you can insert alt text for the images so you will need to edit the /default/includes/display_objects/gallery/index.cfm file and add them.

You can add an empty alt attributes to the IMG elements there however that would mean the page will still not validate so the best option is to add the image summery and strip out the HTML. This works ok if you dont have a long summery for the image.


alt="#REReplaceNoCase(rsSection.summary,'<[^>]*>',','ALL')#"

Is this something that will be address in Sava?

Sava CMS Content Ratings Portal Inheritance

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:24:00 +0100

Before I begin....

I am really starting to enjoy Sava CMS the guys/girls are a credit to the CF community. The helpfulness on their forum is also very commendable, there were cases where I asked a question or made simple feature requests and they updated the version of Sava with fixes or the features within hours of the request.

I have decided to start making some little write ups and contribute in anyway I can. I don't fully know the system yet or make claims to be any CF guru as i am just starting out, however I like to learn so don't shoot me down straight away.

There also maybe other ways in Sava that I have not yet investigated do so some of the things I suggest here or in anyother post I make. The main problems I have found are with SEO in Sava, however I will post bits on that as I play.

Content Ratings Portal Inheritance

The first thing I wanted to write about was a simple fix on an issue I had setting up a portal and adding the content rating to it.

In Sava to stop the repetitive task of manually adding objects like the 'content rating' to every new page created under a portal you can you setup a portal with Inheritance Rules such as 'Start New Cascade', this means that anything added under that particular portal will inherit the display object(s) by default of the Portal its under.

However the portal page itself also has the display object on it when you do this. Its only the content I wanted to be rated not the actual portal page so this needed removing.

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Just a Static Link Please! A Sava Website

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:44:00 +0100

Having now had some time to play around with Sava CMS, and even used it in the development of a couple of recent websites, I want to say a big thank you to the Sava Team.... finally a FREE Open Source CMS written in CF that I found very simple to use yet flexible enough to add complex functions (Farcry CMS not for me, sorry.)

First, very happy with the level of freedom to make complex changes without technical knowledge, and as a developer I found it straightforward to implement my own functionality as I needed.

The frontend design was simple, all the hard work had already been done. Our designer just picked the layout, edited the CSS, and the end result was one great looking site in half the normal time.

I want to start off my Sava section by writing about problems as I come across them (I have to start somewhere), so for this first post lets talk about adding static links...

There were a few times in Sava I needed to manually add a static link in the template to a page that had been created in Sava. Now I know there are a number of way I could have achieved this, but sometimes you just want to add a link, right?


Account

However the above code assumes my other Sava users will not change the name of the page in the Administrator for the account page. So what I needed was a link to the page using something that cannot not change, how about the page ID (linkServId)?


Account

This fixed the problem of the user changing the page name, but the user could still delete the page! The only way I found to stop them doing that was to restrict the other users from deleting the page in Sava using permissions. Simple

Drawbacks: It's not very search engine or user friendly to have something that looks like a session ID in the URL. So I only used this method to link pages that I did not want to be indexed.

I have not found a better way other than writing a query to output the links directly, but in this case I just wanted to manually add a link.

Sava ColdFusion Open Source CMS

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Blue River Interactive Group has released a ColdFusion Open Source Content Management System (CMS) called Sava. This CMS could be a good free alternative to expensive proprietary systems like Paper-Thin and Hot Banana.

So far I have only downloaded their quick express demo which seems impressive featuring a great backend interface. It seems to allow multiple websites management, and generation of friendly URLS.

It looks very extensible from a ColdFusion perspective, but I will let you know more on the installation and setup as I play. In the mean time its worth taking a look yourself.