BlogCFC 5.9.2.004 (and a question).

Thanks to Matt Woodward for finding another issue under OpenBlueDragon. I've just released a minor update that corrects an issue when no blog entries exist. It did not throw an error under Adobe ColdFusion, but, it is a fix that makes sense in general, and may have been exposed in other circumstances as well. In other words, get it. It's a one line change to getEntries, which as you guys know, I heavily modified in the previous version for performance reasons.

New topic: BlogCFC6. I spent a lot of time working on skins for BlogCFC6. I actually got it working... but it was hellishly complex code. The skins weren't, just the code behind it. My objective had been: "Thou shall not see CFML in skins." And I got that working. But... the more I think about it, the more I think it was overkill.

What I'm thinking of now is a skin solution that works with custom tags. So for example, to display an entry, it runs a custom tag and the attributes are passed to it. Layout - ditto. So this means there will be CFML involved, but - and this is the kicker for me - BlogCFC will use a 'contract' with the custom tags. By that I mean, when you design the Entry custom tag, for example, you will know that you will ALWAYS get certain attributes passed in. This means that you can upgrade w/o worry. So let's say I add the Cowbell feature to the blog. Cowbell could be passed as an argument to your (your being your skin) custom tag, and since you don't use it, your skin won't throw an error.

Does that make sense? I'm thinking this could greatly simplify things. I'm also thinking of XML definitions for skins that make it easier to modify w/o making a whole new skin. Kind of like skin arguments.

So imagine some skin called X, made by a great designer. He wants to have a few different versions of the skin, where 100% of the code is the same, but the CSS is _slightly_ different. The XML definition of the skin could point to one CSS, and if I wanted to use the 'varient', I simply edit the XML to point to the other CSS.

That's probably not greatly defined above, but I think you get the idea.

Comments welcome.

FYI - upcoming BlogCFC 5 changes. Andrew Scott found some issues with XML-RPC (my favorite feature, ahem) that will go into the next build. I also plan on getting Twitbacks in soon. Now that I'm a heavy Twitter user I'd love to see this added to BlogCFC.