Hi Jeff, Thank you so much for your thorough answer to my CF question. There is so much valuable info that you have shared here. I greatly appreciate the time you spent.
I am hoping that you will be patient with me and answer a couple more quick questions- Is it any faster or better to host CF on Apache or IIS aside from the mod_rewrite benefit? Are there any shared hosting companies that you can recommend? My company specializes in producing seo websites so I want to make sure that I am learning CF in this manner. In regard to learning about seo using CF, can you point me in the right direction? Do you ever take on freelance projects? Is so, what are you most interested in? Best regards, Bruce Kersten -----Original Message----- From: Jeff Meagher [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2008 10:51 AM To: CF-Newbie Subject: Re: Need to Learn Just to add to this discussion a bit, I currently work at a development agency that's running Coldfusion MX7.02 on Windows with IIS. We mostly use model-glue framework[1] as well, just to speed up development time and reusability of our code. I am also a freelance PHP developer, which is where I started. I "learned" coldfusion in about 3 weeks while I was also learning a new company's way of doing things. Personally, I still like PHP better as the community as a whole is larger and seems more helpful than what I'm found with ColdFusion. But in addition to the Lynda.com tutorial and the CFWACK that was mentioned before, I also suggest you start subscribing to a few ColdFusion blog's RSS and possibly even some podcasts (YES! there really are Coldfusion Podcasts!) Some of the blogs I read include Firemoss by Joe Rhinehart[2] (one, if not the, developer of model-glue) and Ray Camden's Blog by Ray Camden[3] who is also one of the major authors of the CFWACK. Ray Camden does a good job of answering questions and then posting the answers/solutions on his blog. No doubt you'll run into a few complications that he's already answered and having already read it, you'll know how to fix your issue. He does also cater toward the CF community as a whole instead of Rhinehart who does more of the model-glue and Flex CF community. Bruce, you asked about SEO for changing urls and things like that. Our firm also does SEO and I do a great majority of its implementation. A lot of what we do for making SEO friendly URLs is done at a programming level in addition to a URL rewrite package. These are very helpful for changing urls from http://www.mysite.com/myblog/the-cool-article/ into something usable on the CF side like http://www.mysite.com/blog/index.cfm?postid=7. Depending on your server set up, you may not have the capabilities to do this. If you're running Apache[4] webserver, it comes with mod_rewrite[5] built in and is typically enabled on shared hosting. If you're with IIS, it has no built-in URL rewrite engine but has plugins like isapi_rewrite[6] that does the same as mod_rewrite. Basically, if you're really set on using SEO-friendly URLs, you'll need to make sure your hosting set up has either mod_rewrite or something comparable to it on the Window's side. Then, you'll have to learn the syntax as well which is a form of Regular Expressions. Hope that gives you some ideas of where to look and what to look at! Jeff Meagher [1] http://www.model-glue.com [2] http://firemoss.com/blog/ [3] http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/ [4] http://httpd.apache.org/ [5] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html [6] http://www.helicontech.com/isapi_rewrite/ <snip!> -- doing my part to keep this discussion "clean" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;192386516;25150098;k Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Newbie/message.cfm/messageid:3550 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Newbie/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.15
