New Mango Blog Theme: Company Blue

Yes, we coded another Mango Blog theme.  This is the 2nd of what will soon be many themes to be made from the almost forgotten folder of designs we stumbled upon.  This design is called Company Blue and is available for anyone to download and use/change freely under the Creative Commons.

The Company Blue theme has a little bit more style to it than the last theme.  This validated XHTML theme is very professional looking site and is great for any small business.  It is fairly search engine optimized and easy to work on.  It has space for a big promo image on the front page.  It also has a site search tied into every page, making it easier for people to find things on your Mango site.

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Update to Business Mango Theme

Over the weekend, we made some updates to the recently released Business Mango theme. After looking at some of the themes put together by Visual28, we realized we could be doing things better. We were using <cfinclude> files when we should have been using the custom <template> tags. So, with this we needed to add in a little code to the sidebar, footer and header files.

While making these changes, we also started to use <cfsilent> around the import tags in theme files. <cfsilent> suppresses output produced by CFML within a tag's scope, the most common output being unneeded white space. This just helps to keep things clean.

Download Business Mango

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A bonaza of ColdFusion News

There is a lot going on right now in the World of ColdFusion. First, July marks another birthday for our dear ColdFusion. Joseph JJ Allaire and his brother Jeremy released CF in July 1995, making it 14 years old this month. Not surprising, Adobe wished ColdFusion a happy birthday by officially releasing the public beta version of ColdFusion 9 (Centaur) and ColdFusion Builder recently. Since then, the CFers have been blogging machines. Below is a good sampling of the news floating around.

Adobe releases public beta of ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder [ColdFusion Jedi]
Adobe ColdFusion CFML Reference
Adobe ColdFusion 9 Videos [Adobe]
Getting Started With The New ColdFusion Builder [Ben Forta]
Adobe wires ColdFusion into Microsoft Office and SharePoint

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Hackers causing havoc in the World of ColdFusion

Nothing like waking up on a Friday before a holiday to discover that Hackers have been causing havoc in the world of ColdFusion.  Our inbox this morning contained a message from one of our preferred ColdFusion Hosting companies Crystal Tech (now Newtek Technology Services) about the attacks and several CF sites are reporting on the coordinated efforts.

Hackers are exploiting sites running older installations of some ColdFusion applications, such as FCKEditor (a popular HTML text editor) or CKFinder (an Ajax file manager). The potential security vulnerability exists in a popular ColdFusion shopping cart application CFWebstore that allows uploading of a shell script to a vulnerable site and gain root access to the server. For less technical readers, this isn't a good thing. This allows hackers to take advantage of the vulnerabilities to plant malicious scripts onto compromised websites, as part of a drive-by download attack that ultimately aims to infect visitors to the hacked site.

Luckily, none of our CF sites are in danger, as we don't use FCKEditor for anything in our development (TinyMCE rocks!) and CFWebstore is not a product we use for our sites. Plus, Crystal Tech has assured us that that they "have already taken steps to minimize the potential for compromise".

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Top Online ColdFusion Resources

ColdFusion has a wide variety of developers and resources available online. Recently, we asked a question on an Adobe ColdFusion Developer Discussion in Linked In about what everyone's favorite online resource was. So, in honor of that the its recent 13th birthday, and by the help of our Linked In discussion, the Nerds and Brice Cheddarn Studios bring you the Top Online ColdFusion Resources:

http://riaforge.org/ - RIAForge was the brainchild of Ben Forta. The principal developer for the project is Raymond Camden. It is an online community to support developers building open source projects for ColdFusion related platforms.

http://cflib.org/ - The Common Function Library Project (CFLib.org) is another Ray Camden production setup to create a set of user-defined function (UDF) libraries for ColdFusion 5.0 and higher. These libraries are open source and may be used and modified to your liking. Functions range from email format checking to encryption routines. These UDFs can greatly speed up development time as well as add new and powerful features to your web site.

http://www.houseoffusion.com/ - House of Fusion is a powerful (but in need of a redesign) resource supplying quality content to the ColdFusion community for as long as there's been a ColdFusion community. It is a great online utility for ColdFusion Nerds.

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