CFCPhotoBlog Installation, Setup, and UsageEarlier today Seth Duffey released the first public version of his free ColdFusion based photoblog, aptly named CFCPhotoBlog, and is built on the Model-Glue framework by Joe Rinehart.

From the first time I viewed Seth's blog last year I was very impressed with the visual design of the blog, and I can't seem to stop looking at that damn bug. I'm excited to see that Seth has applied his design talents to the production of CFCPhotoBlog. The default skin looks fantastic, and I really like the clever features such as mapping photos on a world map based on the latitude and longitude of the location of the photo, something that you can optionally enter when adding a photo.

The photoblog software ships with a README.html that shares the nice design and is well organized. Setup requires installing the Model-Glue framework (just download and unzip into docroot), creating a ColdFusion datasource, editing a config file, and running a SQL script to build the table schema. One feature I'd like to see is a ColdFusion schema install script to run the querys via a cfm page since I tested the installation on Mac OS X and had to go hunt down SQL Server's Enterprise Manager to run the script.

During my first test I found a small glitch because I was using a Mac, but I emailed Seth and we found a quick solution to the problem. Otherwise, the CFCPhotoBlog software has been amazingly easy to use.

Thinking of feature requests, it would be nice to easily swap out skins, but I haven't explored if its possible at this time. I would like to see the form to add/edit photos provide more combo boxes when choosing metadata fields based on previous entries, since some metadata must be manually typed where it would be nice to have a list of choices. Perhaps a later release will automagically grab the EXIF data for you.

Another feature request might be a Google Adsense pod that optionally sits under each photo after you paste your Adsense code into a config file.

For a first release CFCPhotoBlog exceeds my expectations by far. Well done!

Check out my screenshots of getting started, and get started yourself!

This entry was posted on February 10, 2006 at 1:31 PM and has received 25134 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.