it really has never been easier to get started with Mura CMS. In fact I am going to show you how to get started today without ever visiting the Mura website or setting up a database & datasource.

To get started using my method you need to be running ColdFusion Builder. This is because we are going to look at a cool extension for Builder called Mura Tools. This extension allows you to download the latest version of Mura right into your project. The plugin also offers options for creating and building Mura plugins. To get started follow the instructions for installing Mura Tools using their update site. When you have it installed simply right click on a project and select Mura CMS --> New Mura Install. When the dialog box comes up simply hit finish and the latest version of Mura will be installed, how easy was that?

Next you need to navigate to the project, in my case I have a project on my local machine called muratest so I simply went to http://localhost/muratest. When Mura loads up for the first time you will see a page like the one below. Now it use to be that you had to create a datasource + database and enter that information here but now you no longer have to do that. If you select auto create and enter your admin api password Mura can auto create the database + datasource for you. In the example I created I had the lastest version of Mura installed, a datasource + database created for me and the Mura install finished all under a minute. Now that is impressive!

You have no excuses now. It is about time you give Mura a test drive and see for yourself why it is the best ColdFusion based CMS around. Actually its just an awesome CMS regarding what language it is built on. I have a ton of clients and coworkers who absolutely love the platform. Now go manage some content ;D

This entry was posted on November 8, 2011 at 9:45 PM and has received 1390 views. Comments 0 | Print this entry.

Mura is not only the best Open Source Content Management System (CMS) for ColdFusion but one of my favorites all around. I would recommend it to anyone and really enjoy the power and flexibility of the product. Today they released version 5.4 with some nice new enhancements. The admin is all new with no more yellow band (yay)! Below is the release notes and a link to download the new version.

The newest major version of Mura CMS is final, and currently available for download and one-click upgrades. We're very excited to announce new features such as:

• Change Sets - Mura CMS admin users can now publish groups of changes all at once and can also preview all items in a Change Set as if they are all live prior to publishing.
• Import/Export of Site Bundles - Site Bundles provide the ability to archive and restore entire sites, including all site content, theme, plugins, users and more. This one is huge!
• New Mobile-Optimized Output - Mura CMS now contains built-in mobile device detection, and the ability to automatically switch your site's display to a mobile-optimized template. To make this as easy as possible, Mura CMS 5.4 includes a jQuery Mobile-based template; you can use this or roll your own as you like.
• New Mura CMS Themes - We'll be launching with three new paid themes, and will be adding many more (both free and paid) over the next few months. Themes also now come with default bundles so you can have a fully-built out example site with your theme download.
• Static HTML Export - You can now create a static HTML version of any Mura CMS site. This is great for highly-scalable content-driven sites where having full-page static rendering is important (think Craigslist-like sites, not Facebook).
• Remote Session Object - Our remote connector plugin provided the ability to easily share session data with external applications. This proved so useful that we've integrated this functionality into the Mura core.
• HTML Foot Queue - You can now dynamically add content or include files on an as-needed basis (much like HTML Head Queue, but in the footer).
• HTML 5 Templates - The default theme that ships with Mura CMS (Merced) now contains HTML 5 (transitional) structures and code.
• CKFinder - We've replaced the Mura CMS File Manager functionality with CKFinder - a much more robust and usable toolkit. CKFinder is also used in image uploads and other core Mura CMS areas.
• Improved URL Filtering Options - You can now access cleaner and more human-readable URLS for Categories, Dates and Tags, as well as URL parameters for custom apps.
• New Admin Design and Functionality - We've made some design updates to the Admin section and front-end editing toolbar (goodbye to the yellow bar), added lists of Recent Comments to the Dashboard, and applied some minor cleanup to the Admin screens.

Mura CMS 5.4 is the best version of Mura CMS ever - faster, more powerful, easier to use and more feature-rich. Download or upgrade now!
 

Download Mura 5.4

This entry was posted on February 2, 2011 at 6:00 PM and has received 2300 views. Comments 2 | Print this entry.

I am working on finishing up a new project here at work that uses Mura CMS. We wanted the site to have some search capabilities but honestly didn't want to spend anytime building our own or integrating a custom search engine.

We started looking at Mura to see if there were any built in capabilities and sure enough there was. If you look under {siteid}/includes/display_objects you will find dsp_search_form.cfm and dsp_search_results.cfm. We wanted to include the search form in our header, lucky for us that is pretty easy to do. If you open up your header template you can drop the following code in to include the search form. <cfoutput>#$.dspInclude('display_objects/dsp_search_form.cfm')#</cfoutput>

Now I had a form that my users could enter a search term in and hit go. The default is to redirect the user to the page that they are on and display the results. This really doesn't look good to me so what we ended up doing is creating a page in the site manager that does not show up in the navigation. So I have a page for my search results, and now I just needed to mod my search form so it posts to that page and itself. In {siteid}/includes/display_objects/dsp_search_form.cfm modify the action so it looks something like this. <form name="searchFrm" id="svSearchForm" method="get" action="index.cfm/search-results">

With everything in place we started testing the search functionality and it just was not bringing back the result we were expecting. I realized we were using Oracle and that any text comparisons we were doing are going to be Case Sensitive. This means if we were looking for Study Guide in the database and the user typed study guide in the form we were not going to find a match. I started digging around and I found the method that does the search. If you look in /requirements/mura/content/contentGateway.cfc you will find a method named getPublicSearch.

The easy fix for this is to do comparison of the search term and the text in the database in the same case. So I went through and updated the where clause to look something like this. (UPPER(tcontent.Title) like <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="%#UCase(arguments.keywords)#%"> or UPPER(tcontent.menuTitle) like <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="%#UCase(arguments.keywords)#%"> or UPPER(tcontent.metaKeywords) like <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="%#UCase(arguments.keywords)#%"> or UPPER(tcontent.summary) like <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="%#UCase(arguments.keywords)#%"> or UPPER(tcontent.body) like <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="%#UCase(arguments.keywords)#%">) Now when I tested the search everything was working as expected. Here is the entire search method in case you don't feel like updating it yourself. I attached the code as an enclosure because of the amount of code.

This entry was posted on January 24, 2011 at 1:37 PM and has received 1713 views. Comments 0 | Print this entry. Download attachment.

I have really started to dive into Mura lately and hopefully this will be the first post of many to come. If you have not had a chance to check out Mura CMS there is no time like the present. Mura has some really cool features but what really gets me is how easy it is to use. I have the ColdFusion Jedi himself comment a couple times on how easy Mura is to setup and I really have to agree with him. There is nothing better to me then when a product just works like this, it really makes it easier to work with. I also had the pleasure of having dinner & drinks with the guys from Mura at cfObjective() and they are really a great group. What are you waiting for, head over to the website and download Mura CMS now! If anyone has some installation questions let me know, maybe ill create a quick install video if folks need it.

This entry was posted on July 20, 2009 at 9:33 AM and has received 3901 views. Comments 3 | Print this entry.