Archive for month: July, 2009

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OxAlto Capita – A Free Theme for Mango Blog

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As I’ve been exploring some more CF open source apps, I’ve come across Mango Blog which I’m really beginning to like.

So, as an attempt to get to the know the bits under the hood, I’ve written a theme which I’ve decided to release under Creative Commons – so that’s free to use for all you Mango Blog users.

It’s based on the Blueprint CSS framework, so hopefully you should be able to take advantage on the various layout schemes incorporated into that.

The banner image remains property of The Hinksey Studio, but has been released for use in this theme.

Edit: This is now available directly via the Mango Blog Admin interface – Thanks Laura!

BluePrint CSS wrapper for BlogCFC

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Quick BlueprintCSS wrapper for BlogCFC v0.1

This is a set of starter stylesheets using the BluePrintCSS framework (see http://www.blueprintcss.org/ for full usage) for BlogCFC. As always, I take no responsibility whatsoever for anything you might do with this.

Essentially all I’ve done is add the BluePrintCSS as the main starting point, and added a few classes to the layout customtag so it works under Blueprints CSS concept. Also added a few custom classes in bp_custom.css to make it a bit prettier. Add your changes to bp_custom.css – as it’s the last one to be called, it’ll override anything set in the defaults.

Tested briefly on BlogCFC 5.9.3.006

NB: This is meant as a starting point – I’ve not spent ages with elements like the pods etc. Hopefully it’ll save someone somewhere some time – the reason I’ve bothered putting it in a zip is that I have to integrate blogCFC into most of my sites (which happen to always use BluePrint);

Install instructions:

  1. Backup/Move/Rename the file at /yourblog/tags/layout.cfm
  2. Download the zip and decompress
  3. Copy layout.cfm into /yourblog/tags/
  4. Copy the four stylesheets into /yourblog/includes/
  5. Restart the blogCFC cache using /?reinit=1

Credits:

Screenshot

Download

Railo / Apache / Tomcat / Mura CMS/ SES URL Gotcha

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Another catchy title :)

I’ve been trying for a day or two to get SES Urls working on Tomcat/Railo/Apache/Mura;

Specifically, I’m thinking of the /index.cfm/something/ style syntax. Having installed Mura, I couldn’t get any of the actual pages past the front page to work. I got an Apache 404 error.

Sean Corfield’s Blog gave me a good starting point.

As I’d installed Railo via the Beta install script, my config was a little different to some which is what gave me the headache.

Firstly, I had to get Tomcat to receive the requests, as Apache was serving me the 404s;

In my Apache httpd.conf file, I had the following at the bottom:

JkMount /*.cfm ajp13
JkMount /*.cfc ajp13
JkMount /*.do ajp13
JkMount /*.jsp ajp13
JkMount /*.cfchart ajp13
JkMountCopy all
JkLogFile /var/log/httpd/mod_jk.log

Note, the *.cfm entry – this needs changing to:

JkMount /*.cfm* ajp13

This means apache matched the correct syntax to pass the request to Tomcat.

So at that point, I was getting 404’s served by Tomcat rather than Apache; at least they were getting to the correct place.

For me, my Tomcat install lives in /opt/railo/tomcat/, so I found the web.xml file in /opt/railo/tomcat/conf/ and changed added a servlet mapping:

CFMLServlet /index.cfm/*

And then tried again with Mura. No joy – still 404’s in Tomcat; Having re-read Sean’s entry, it turns out you have to specify if you want the pattern to match a directory;

So the servlet mapping I’d put up would match /index.cfm/*, but not, as Mura users know, the default Mura behaviour of /default/index.cfm/*

Changing to:

CFMLServlet /default/index.cfm/*

Sorts it.

I know there’s a jar file supplied by Mura to fix this – but with my seemingly different Tomcat config, I could work out how to get it working properly.

Next stage is going to have to be to get the URL rewriting working to get proper URLs like /about-us/, rather than /default/index.cfm/about-us/.

Finally – some Railo VPS goodness

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I think I’m slightly over the top happy that I’ve got Railo working now..

All thanks to Jordan Michaels’s beta installer (get on the Google Railo Beta list to get access – http://groups.google.com/group/railo-beta/) which worked perfectly.

Had a couple of hiccups, but they were completely my own fault – I was getting a 503 error whenever I tried to serve a .cfm page; checked the logs, and low and behold TomCat couldn’t start: something was using port 8080. (A java.net.BindException: Address already in use:8080 error)

A quick “netstat -anp | grep 8080” command, and lo and behold, I’d set Apache to listen on 8080 in the http.conf.

Took that out, and restart apache/railo, and all is happy.

Now I’ve just got to read up on Railo security, and pop a bit more RAM In the VPS (it sits at about 140MB with railo/mysql/tomcat and the OS), oh and test *everything*.

As Hannibal would say – “I love it when a plan comes together” :)

In at the deep end – getting a VPS

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Well, after some research, I’ve decided to go and take the plunge and get a basic VPS.

My aim is to get Railo/Resin/Apache/PHP/MySQL running on Centos 5.3.

I’ve gone for Wizz VPS, as they’re UK based, and a child company of my current PHP hosting – Layershift, with whom I’ve had good experiences – they are also staggeringly cheap.

They’re also completely unmanaged, so I’m on my own…

Getting mySQL and PHP installed was easy, just using the VPS containers package management system (so a bit of point and click). Installing yum and then using that was equally easy. ‘yum update’ = genius.

I’ve been fairly taken back by just *how* efficiently RAM seems to be handled under Linux/Centos. I’m used to a windows box, where just running the OS and CF8 can take up the best part of a GB. I’ve currently got MySQL and PHP, and the OS running under 40MB (not under any load of course) which is amazing.

The tricky part is going to be getting Railo in and running. Whilst there seems to be a fair amount of chat on the Railo Google group about creating some definitive install guides, I’m finding the lack of a definitive install guide somewhat frustrating. I’ve managed to do some things, like install Java for compiling connectors etc, but the syntax (and really, the true understanding of what I’m trying to achieve) does escape me a bit at the moment. My Linux Kung-Fu needs work.

Hopefully we should start seeing some proper documentation for Railo production environments soon! (and I mean documentation for the latest Railo version, and the latest and greatest Linux distros).

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