FarCry_aura is a sample website. It's fully functional. You can demonstrate nearly all the core compoents from this build. We use it as a "grey build" to get a prototype up and running for clients. We hope that new users to FarCry will also find it useful.
I agree that it's a sucessful "grey build" and a sample base for a website, but probably not a sample website itself. I think Aura is great and I appreciate the fact that you've released it - I'm just volunteering to help with a more content complete sample website (that has more objects in the tree to begin with) which would allow people to play and learn rather than using as a base.
Farcry_aura is optional. We felt FarCry would make more sense to people if it simply worked when you installed it so we added FarCry_aura to the install. The community is free to develop additional templates -- these could be hosted on the farcry website as alternative for the installer.
My mistake. A while back I tried to install it without Aura and it berked - I added Aura and it was fine...
There are not three *separate* downloads. The full installer is all anyone needs. The other downloads are sections of the code base that are versioned separately and are provided as a convenience for more advanced developers only.
See what happens when you rant at 4am in the morning... lol... another one of those 'A while back i had to install all three'... i really should have paid attention to the website. My apologies.
I think folks need to realise that FarCry is not some experiment we have thrown out to the general community. It's not an idea that a bunch of CF guys with free time are building. FarCry CMS is an enterprise class suite of software that has been built over many years and then released as open source. It's feature set far exceeds anything in open source within the ColdFusion community, and is equivalent to many mid-to-high end commercial CMS/Portal systems on any platform.
From the talk on the mailing list it sounds like everybody understands that it's a powerful, enterprise-class framework and not written by a bunch of 'CF guys'. I think people just want to be able to play with the advanced features right off-the-bat which is why we get some confused people on the list. Maybe this is unreasonable -- maybe not?
It's open and flexible because over the years we've had to deal with many different types of clients and a multitude of scenarios. Most installations will only use a fraction of the functionality in this product.
A community forum / exchange, I'm sure, would help people see the flexibility of the system -- especially when people start contributing custom types, admin screens and site templates. My first contribution would be an FAQ custom type (as necessity is the mother of invention).
It's worth noting that many of our own client pitches are done using simply Aura. More functionality can be demonstrated with this "simple" out-of-the-box app than will fit in a 2-hour technical session. You just need to familiarise yourself with what's there.
Ok well what's really needed then is "A tour of FarCry with Aura" page on the farcry website, but unless someone knowledgable with FarCry wants to spend the time to create one then it's never going to happen.
I've made a tutorial on implementing CSS tabs on the Aura nav bar on my dev box (http://2s-dev.mine.nu) and I'd love to contribute more beginner tutorials... they'd be nothing amazing - just help break the ice for newcomers I guess...
All of the things you have described bar the custom PLP can be demonstrated in the standard farcry_aura build.
Only if you have the knowledge to be able demonstrate them -- and unfortunately companies aren't going to fork out training for a system they aren't yet confident with. What I suggested was a document & downloadable website that would give developers the confidence to demo the system, while at the same time providing a learning ground as to best practices of advanced farcry functionality.
The features I listed in the feature list were merely a suggestion of what the "A tour of FarCry with Aura" page would concentrate on from a demonstration point of view... as you pointed out the system has the ability to show all (well... most) of those things out of the box. By adding more prebuilt content into the tree it allows a bit more playing rather than fumbling - but I think this should be separate to Aura.
A while ago on the lists it was mentioned that it was unfortunate that some FarCry dev's couldn't demonstrate their code as it was proprietary.
Nobody expects the Daemon team to spend their time with this, as you already have the skills to demonstrate the system, but what I want is to create a site (with the help of others) which is free to download and really demonstrates the power of FarCry. As I said before I'd be willing to help with the template design and supporting document giving a tour of the system while showing off the aforementioned feature list.
Is there an editor you recommend that we should support? We're totally agnostic when it comes to the rich text editor implementation.
While the world waits for a java applet open-source RTE I think HTMLArea (3) is the next best bet. It's xhtml compliant, works with both IE and Moz, modular OO JS with 'plugin' capabilities (so we could make plugins to take advantage of different farcry specific things), has a active community support forum and a very open license:
http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/
- tim
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MXDU2004 + Macromedia DevCon AsiaPac + Sydney, Australia http://www.mxdu.com/ + 24-25 February, 2004
