> > I deployed Farcry on a slow system, I am the first one to admit. This > system > (Pentium III 1.0 Ghz, 512 MB, CF 7.02, SQL server) never suffered from > performance problems before (Even with apps using the Coldspring and > Transfer framework). Farcry's CMS is, however, dead slow. I realise that > it > has to do with the hardware I am running it on, but I have no clue as to > what Farcry's > system requirements are or better, what the recommended hardware is.
Wow! 512mb with cf7 AND SQL Server and no performance issues! Lucky you! ;) Both SQL Server and CF recommend 1GB of RAM - each! CF7 and CF8 are much happier with 2GB of RAM and SQL Server is a resource hog. Farcry 4 does a lot of caching in memory to help speed things up. 512MB is probably the absolute minimum you'd run a development server with, so on a production server Farcry and CF along with SQL Server will eat this through this memory in no time causing the server to have to page memory to and from the hard disk. If the hard disk in question is fairly full or not very quick then this will impact severely on the performance of any application. I run a production server with 2GB of fast RAM with cf7.0.2 with MySQL 5.xfor a very busy site. CF and MySQL needed to be performance tuned, as you should with any server/application, but it runs quite happily. - lot of rough edges > > Farcry's cms looks great, but I can't help feeling that some options/menu > choices seem illogical, and others are vague. > Here are some examples: > - To me it seems 'Content' and 'site' are one and the same. They should > not > be on different tabs. Or have different names and not offer similar > functionality. Actually they do offer different functionality. Site provides the ability to create, edit and view the structure of your site, but does provide you short cuts to the add/edit html pages. Content provides management facilities for the individual items with in the application. This does indeed cover editing HTML pages, but does not provide the ability to put these HTML pages into a structure. It also includes media libraries for images, files and flash objects, management for stylesheets and included objects, such as forms, facilities for exporting content via RSS or XML, managing keywords (content categories) and shared containers, facilities for quickly building site and managing archived content. The last option in the drop down, dynamic content, is where you will find management for custom type from the likes or farcrycms or your own custom types. - When adding an image to the library it says 'FitInside' underneath the > Source image form element. FitInside where? What does that mean? Fitinside is pretty standard image resizing terminology. It means just that. The image you are uploading will be fitted inside the specified dimensions. The dmImage default is 400x1000, which is clearly marked on the upload form. - when that image is added and I select it, then click the 'approve' button > it asks me to enter some comments. After submitting I am presented with a > screen where it says the item is in draft. ? But I just approved it right? Enter some comments and hit ok. The comments are part of the versioning system. The purpose of the comments is to allow you to make a comment as to why you (any user) made a change to that object/record. Farcry is usable by one person, but it is also eminently capable of handling simple contributors/publisher/editor workflows. (More complex workflow functionality coming in Fortress) Apparently not, because now I can(must?) approve again. Just don't hit cancel on the comments and your page will be approved first time. - some of the text displayed in buttons doesn't fit, making them illegible. Care to elaborate? Which browser? Which version of Farcry? Which buttons? - there is a plugins tab that lists one plugin (google maps), and there is a > plugins config file that talks about 3 different plugins none of which are > mentioned on the plugins tab. This is a fairly simple misunderstanding - Not all plugins create tabs and any plug-in may override any element in the webtop (the administration interface). FacryCMS added entries under the Content > Dynamic Content section of the administrator. GoogleMaps adds a tab of its own. FarcryVerity adds "Verity Plugin" to the drop down under the Admin tab. Yeah this should probably be better documented for each plug-in and the GoogleMaps plugin, which was a very early FC4alpha plugin, should get a quick rework to add it to the Dynamic Content section. I am pretty sure I was asked If I wanted to > use a CFXimage plugin during setup as well. It is not on the tab, nor in > the > config file. Confusing. CFXImage is actually one plug-in that does not add anything to the admin interface. CFXImage plug-in overrides the default image manipulation functionality in the dmImage type. Farcry, by default uses the image manipulation embedded in ColdFusion. The CFXImage plug-in allows you to override this functionality with the CFXImage DLL. - the context menu's that appear after right-clicking a tree item, will only > close when you select an item OR when clicked *above* the displayed menu. > (tested in FF 2.0.0.11) Yeah - minor annoyance - one that probably should be in the Fortress list of improvements.. hint hint Geoff ;) The above mentioned examples are just a few, there are more to be found. > > - Documentation It seems almost as if all open source projects suffer from the same problem: > Documentation. Yup - its a perennial problem with Open Source projects. Either there isn't time to create the documentation, so noone ever does any documentation what so ever. Or a wiki is provided, the developers do their best to document features, but the demand for updates and new features overrides the need for documentation and the people who use the software complain about the lake of documentation, but don't actually help to increase or update the documentation. Farcry is, alas, no different. A wiki is not *the* answer to all > documentation problems. Nope - that's why there is a 100+ page training manual. ;) http://docs.farcrycms.org:8080/confluence/display/FCDEV40/Home Especially not a wiki that has lots of open/dead ends, and makes things more > confusing then provide clearity. See above comments. Most of the answers I was seeking, answers > to common questions, where found in the mailinglist. And that says it all. > I > am apparently not the only one. I'm as guilt as the rest for not updating the documents, but I do my best to help answer as many questions as possible and try to add bits and pieces when I can. I should say though that the documentation for 4.x is substantially better than the 3.0 documentation and is updated on a daily basis. How about something simple as little help popups/ tooltips on the farcry cms > pages? The farcry formtools which came in in version 4 have this ability and slowly but surely the formtools are being used to replace the existing editors. Why is there, after so many years of development, no help system? > > Other problems/issues I ran into: > > - version info ? > > I was not able to detect what version of Farcry I was actually using. > There > is no about box, there is no info at the login screen. Edit: my eye > accidentally fell upon the hard to read, small text in the lower right > corner of the cms and there it is mentioned. Its not really one of those things that the casual user needs to know, so its not something that needs to jump out of the page. It is, however, on every page of the admin. - languages broken ? > > It seems Farcry's multilanguage possibillities are broken in release 4.x I do believe it is working - take a look at the resource files for lingual set up for the admin area, the database is capable of storing all latin based languages and farcry has been used for a few asian language sites with a bit of tweaking - However, multilingual support in Farcry is currently under going a major revamp in the Fortress milestone. - Friendly URLS > > I only got friendly URLS to work after fiddling around with some config > files, and reading through a lot of emails from the mailinglist. It then > failed because it couldn't find 404.cfm. I created one, which made the > FU's > work,but the 404.cfm doesnt seem to do anything. When I enter a non > existing FU, I am presented with a totally blank page. http://docs.farcrycms.org:8080/confluence/display/FCDEV30/Friendly+URL+Configuration I've added a note about enabling FU to the wiki. The 404.cfm allows you to create your own custom 404 page or simple redirect to the page or your choice. If the page is empty this is because there is either nothing in your 404 page or an error has occurred - used debug=1 on the url to see if there is any debugging information that has been trapped. - reporting. > > The reporting feature is indeed a very nice one. But what if I already > have > one I'd like to use? > There seems to be no way to switch farcry's reporting system off. Farcry > needs to keep track of > visited pages some way or the other so this means extra overhead I don't > need when I use external reporting tools. There is a way to disable the reporting, but, and I have to be honest here, I can't find the note on this right now. Better news though... The reporting tab will be removed in Fortress to a plug-in, so you need only install it if you want these features. - And finally, what really confused me: > > When creating HTML pages, it took me while before I understood how to use > uploaded images in the body part. You need to first have a relationship > and > have an image selected in the associated media. (why are those items > draggable there?, why can I tick items on and off, only for deleting?). The are draggable, so that you can sort them. It is possible to add a rule that picks up the child/related objects and display them. That rule can either display the objects in the order that they are show in the editor or in some order specified in the rule, eg. alphabetic, numeric, date added so on. The check box is simply to allow you to remove selected related items. When clicking the 'open library' button to add items to that associated > media only sometimes the html screen upon returning is updated. Items > *are* > added, they just don't show up in the screen. The library functionality was fairly recently added to farcry and, while it works perfectly 9/10, there are still some issues - particularly in 4.0.9I'm led to believe. Again, I think this is something that is getting a revamp in Fortress. When an item is in the associated media list, only then the 'related object > content templates' button ( the one that has the farcry logo in it) is > usefull. > It shows all related content, but has some weird behavior: > *Only* when an item is being previewed first, it can be inserted. And when > I > click the insert button, the image is inserted but the next click (any > click, anywhere) in the 'related object content templates' window closes > it. > This means that when I want to add 25 images, I have to reopen the window > 25 > times. 25 images! you mad man! ;) But yes this would be an issue under these circumstances. Adding that number of images... perhaps there is a need for a custom type and suitable rules for this, so that you need only add the appropriate records to the database and apply a rule to a page, so that all this is done for you automatically? When adding an html page though the same popup it requires me to select a > 'display type'. The dropdown is empty and thus I cant add anything. I > probably have to set up a display type somewhere, but.. ah well.. back to > the mailinglist I guess.. This is all, to put it mildly, counter intuitive. hmmm... well I think it depends on your point of view... Having played with some of the commercial CMS offerings, including Spectra, as well as some of the php OS cms systems, I have to say that Farcry is probably more intuitive and more flexible than any of them. Sure, after a lot of trial and error I will probably figure it out, but it > makes me feel like a (dumb) user. > Suppose you are a user. And you are left in charge of your companies > website > and it's content, to be managed with this version of farcry. Be honest.. Everything new, particularly complex systems like a content management system, does have a fairly steep learning curve. Open Source applications, because of their poor documentation, are probably harder to get started with. However, I have to say that 18 months ago when I started with Farcry (is it really that long ago!) A lot of criticism, I know. But meant to be constructive. It is not my > intention to bash Farcry. Far from it. Please don't take offense, but from your comments above it would appear that you've only really scratched the surface of what Farcry is capable of. There is so much more functionality to it than covered by the few, relatively, minor points that you've raised. As you've already discovered the farcry Google groups are an excellent resource. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask for help when you come across a problem rather than struggling on. Someone is guaranteed to be able to direct you to the appropriate wiki page or answer your question. I hope that helps you to understand Farcry better and to answer some of your questions. Regards Stephen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "farcry-dev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/farcry-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
