Latest news from Andy Allan RE SOTR 2012

Back in October we blogged about what was happening in regards 2012.

This news subsequently opened up communication on Twitter that led to the creation of a Google Group to discuss ideas, and ultimately a plan that would allow the 2012 conference to take place.

We then announced that we would make a decision on the conference based on feedback from two partner meetings at the end of November. Initial feedback was positive but we worried we wouldn't have a quick enough turnaround and so it looked like the conference would not happen.

We're delighted to say we are now pushing forward with Sotr2012, but we're looking for some feedback.

As we continuously push to bring in new attendees and sponsors, we've been discussing whether a move from Edinburgh to Amsterdam would help. Amsterdam is a central hub that would involve a direct flight for most people (whereas Edinburgh may involve a connection), it's an attractive location and it has the potential to attract more international interest.

We've opened up a simple one question survey for you to answer: Amsterdam or Edinburgh.You can vote here. We plan to have more details announced in January, but you can follow us on Twitter for more frequent titbits of information.

Thanks to the folks over at HeliconTech we now have a new configuration FREE IIS friendly installer of Railo, which I have now installed on the cfmldeveloper servers. To read more about the new installer see my blog.

Enabling Railo is really simple, just create your site as normal, then go into the file manager, navigate into the wwwroot and edit the web.config file.

now replace the contents of the file with the following.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <configuration>
     <system.webServer>
         <heliconZoo>
         <application name="railo.project">
         <environmentVariables>
         </environmentVariables>
         </application>
         </heliconZoo>
         <handlers>
             <remove name="coldfusion" />
             <add name="railo.project#x86.cfm" scriptProcessor="railo" path="*.cfm" verb="*" modules="HeliconZoo_x86" preCondition="bitness32" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
             <add name="railo.project#x86.cfc" scriptProcessor="railo" path="*.cfc" verb="*" modules="HeliconZoo_x86" preCondition="bitness32" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
             <add name="railo.project#x86.cfml" scriptProcessor="railo" path="*.cfml" verb="*" modules="HeliconZoo_x86" preCondition="bitness32" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
             <add name="railo.project#x86.cfr" scriptProcessor="railo" path="*.cfr" verb="*" modules="HeliconZoo_x86" preCondition="bitness32" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
             <add name="railo.project#x86.cfswf" scriptProcessor="railo" path="*.cfswf" verb="*" modules="HeliconZoo_x86" preCondition="bitness32" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
             <add name="railo.project#x64.cfm" scriptProcessor="railo" path="*.cfm" verb="*" modules="HeliconZoo_x64" preCondition="bitness64" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
             <add name="railo.project#x64.cfc" scriptProcessor="railo" path="*.cfc" verb="*" modules="HeliconZoo_x64" preCondition="bitness64" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
             <add name="railo.project#x64.cfml" scriptProcessor="railo" path="*.cfml" verb="*" modules="HeliconZoo_x64" preCondition="bitness64" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
             <add name="railo.project#x64.cfr" scriptProcessor="railo" path="*.cfr" verb="*" modules="HeliconZoo_x64" preCondition="bitness64" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
             <add name="railo.project#x64.cfswf" scriptProcessor="railo" path="*.cfswf" verb="*" modules="HeliconZoo_x64" preCondition="bitness64" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
         </handlers>
 
     </system.webServer>
</configuration>

This will also disable the ColdFusion handler, which is enabled by default.

Now open your railo admin and set your password. DONE!
http://yoursite.cfmldeveloper.com/railo-context/admin/web.cfm

If you get a ColdFusion "not found" error on the above URL then your site is trying to use ColdFusion instead of Railo.

SEO Friendly URL's

If you need to use SEO friendly URL's for things like Mangoblog and MuraCMS, this doesn't work out of the box with railo.

in your web root you will have a "web-inf" folder which is created automatically the first time you run a CFM page, this contains your Railo context, inside this folder create a web.xml file and paste in the below contents fig 2. 
This will allow the most common SEO URL  "index.cfm/something" to work, I have also included the required filters for MangoBlog. Now you just need to modify this file within each of your sites and add any required url-filters.
The only caveat is that you need to restart your app server in order for the settings to take affect, This can be done via the website properties page in website panel, see Fig 1 below, or by making a change to your web.comfig file which causes the app pool to recycle, this must be a real change, not just adding spaces.

FIG 1

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<web-app
xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
metadata-complete="true"
version="2.5"
>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>CFMLServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>index.cfm/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/post.cfm/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/archives.cfm/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/page.cfm/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/author.cfm/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/feeds.cfm/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>