Back in February of 2019 David Belanger and Tom King from the CFWheels core team sat down with Michaela Light on the ColdFusion Alive Podcast to have a chat about CFWheels. A few weeks ago Peter Amiri had a chance to speak to Michaela Light about recent developments in the CFWheels community, how to contribute to the project, and the road map ahead.
You can view the episode notes on the TeraTech website.
Back in May 2022 we posted a blog article announcing that CFWheels has moved to GitHub Discussions. At the time this effected the retirement of the Google mailing list and redirecting the links on the home page to the new GitHub Discussions site. Now the time has come to also retire the CFWheels channel on the CFML Slack instance.
Feel free to go back and read the original post from May that laid out the reasoning for this move but we thought it was important to reiterate our thought process once again. At the core, the reasons for this move are to move our discussions closer to the code, allowing the poster and respondent to more easily link to specific branches, files, and even lines of code. Issues can be converted to discussions if they warrant further community input or discussions promoted to an issue once an issue or feature has had open consultation and next steps identified. Discussions can be marked as answered and the specific answer identified for future reference. And most importantly, all these discussions, collaborations, and consultations are searchable and discoverable by search engines so the community as a whole reaps the benefits.
We have seen how the move to GitHub discussions by other open source communities has benefited their community and brought their discussions closer to the codebase. We hope this move by us will be similarly fruitful.
This version is the accumulation of bug fixes and minor enhancements over the last quarter. This release welcomes John Bampton and Coleman Sperando, two first time contributors to the project.
It should be an easy upgrade, just swap out the wheels folder.
Enter install cfwheels in the root of your site to update your wheels folder to the latest.
It’s hard to believe it took so long to get here but modern CFML development has come a long way thanks to tools like CommandBox and ForgeBox. The Wheels CLI is built as a CommandBox module and wouldn’t have even been possible without the support of the fine folks at Ortus Solutions.
The first commit to the repo for this project was committed back in July of 2016. It’s taken a while, that’s an understatement, to get here but Wheels itself jumped to 2.0, CommandBox matured, and we were able to put the plumbing in place to support the communication between the CLI and the running server. With nearly 300 commits in the repo, 25 commands in the CLI, and over 20 pages of documentation, it’s now time to take the alpha/beta label off send this baby out into the world.
Some of the more notable commands are wheels new to use our wizard to start a brand new project. With this command and the corresponding wheels generate app command, you can start a new Wheels project in a directory, specify the template to use, pick the CF engine to use, configure the datasource, and setup your reload password. In fact there’s a whole host of generate commands for every type of object you may want to create. There are a bunch of dbmigrate commands to interact with database migrations.
To install the CLI issue the following command:
box install cfwheels-cliDon’t forget to check out the full CLI Commands section in the guides too.
Back in March we published an example app where we took the TodoMVC spec and built a reference implementation of the app with CFWheels and htmx. Here is a quick graphic of the UI of the app.
This app has now been added to the list of Server-Side integration examples on the htmx website.
htmx at it’s core is html over the wire. Instead of returning JSON from backend APIs and consuming them with Javascript to build page interactivity, htmx takes a different approach. It expects actual html snippets to be returned that are swapped into the DOM. How it does it, is by extending html with a handful of additional attributes, that probably should have been there in the first place, which enable any HTML element to issue an AJAX call to the backend, specify what triggers the call, and specify how the returned HTML should be added to the DOM.
We’ll be doing more with HTMX in the future so it’s great to get CFWheels on the radars of the htmx project.
We have published two new repositories named cfwheels/cfwheels-www and cfwheels/cfwheels-api which handle the CFWheels.org landing page site and the api.cfwheels.org API documentation site respectively.
The cfwheels-api repository is a good example of how you can structure your own projects and keep sensitive information and the core framework files out of your project’s source control repository. The project used a .gitignore file that keeps these files out of the repo. It also uses a box.json file to specify some dependencies to pull the required files back in.
Using dependencies in a box.json file is nothing new but what’s interesting is that cfwheels/cfwheels-api has three dependencies defined. One is the core framework itself and pulls in the latest framework folder. The second is the newly published CFWheels DotEnvSettings Plugin which allows keeping sensitive information out of the repository by using a locally defined .env file. The last dependency is probably the most interesting, cause that one pulls in the Semantic Version module from ForgeBox which is a module that wasn’t specifically written for CFWheels but can be pulled in and used none the less. This opens up the potential of using many more modules from ForgeBox instead of being confined to just CFWheels Plugins.
Although Google Groups has served us well over the years, it’s started to lose some essential abilities and it’s looking a little long in the tooth.
We have decided that it would be a benefit to the community to migrate to GitHub Discussions. GitHub Discussions allows us to bring our community closer to where the code lives.
“People around the world are turning to open source—and to GitHub. It is becoming not only the home for developers, but a platform where people in many roles, doing diverse work, come to learn, engage with the community, and contribute to projects that advance the greater good.”
GitHub Octoverse 2020 Report
The benefits of moving to Github Discussions are numerous, but at a glance, we look forward to having better syntax highlighting, marking comments as answers, flagging threads as Answered, easily turning a discussion into an issue, and many more.
The Google Group will remain available, but we have disabled posting to the group, and we’ll treat it as a read-only archive of past discussions.
We are happy to launch a new program that we hope will lead to a more stable framework for all of us. Effective immediately we are launching our Bug Bounty program. When we first conceived of the bounty program we were looking at programs from IssueHunt and BountySource and the main goal was to widen the field of contributors to the CFWheels project as well as crush some of the long standing bugs in the framework.
Most of these bugs are edge cases that don’t effect the core functionality of the framework and for the most part users have found work arounds for. In the past it’s been difficult to dedicate our limited resources towards some of these bugs but now that we have a growing list of monthly sponsors we would like to launch out bounty program to compensate contributors who are willing to tackle some of these.
The easiest way to get started participating in this program is to visit the issues list and look for the $50 Bounty tag. Pick an issue that interests you, clone the repo, and start working on your solution. When you think you have a working solution create a PR and submit it for review. Please read the Contributing to CFWheels chapter in the guides or the contributing guidelines in the repository for details on how to contribute to the CFWheels project.
We look forward to see how the community responds to this bounty program. Depending on how things go, we can envision expanding this program to include enhancements as well as sponsorship of individual enhancements.
This is the official v2.3.0 release. It is dropping a little over a week from Release Candidate 1. We simply wanted to make sure the new CI/CD workflow was functioning before calling the release final. We feel confident that we’re good to mark this release as final. There are no new enhancement or bug fixes in this release from 2.3.0.rc.1.
If should be an easy upgrade, just swap out the wheels folder.
Please refer to release 2.3.0.rc.1 for details.
We are glad to announce that the CFWheels Guides have been moved to GitBook.com. The good folks at GitBook are proud to support CFWheels and have granted us an Open Source Community account. We have migrated all the guides from our old provider to GitBook and will be making some more changes as we review all the links now that the domain has been switched. A few things you’ll notice right off the bat.
There is now a PDF download link to the right of the screen when viewing the guides. The link allows you to download the section you are on or the entire CFWheels Guides. Which by the way, is nearly 300 pages long. There is also a new search feature that will allow you to find topics easier. But the biggest change comes from the fact that by moving to GitBook we were able to move the guides to GitHub as well.
In fact the guides have been added as a sub directory in the cfwheels/cfweels GitHub repository. By moving the guides within the codebase, you can finally include both code changes and documentation changes in the same PR. This will make the guides more accessible to our contributors and make it easier to keep the codebase and guides in sync.
Please have a look through the new guides and let us know what you think. Oh, and if you find something that needs to be updated, you know the drill, clone, edit, and submit a PR.