good stuff mike, good stuff!! CFTALK ROCKS. that's fur sure :)
-----Original Message----- From: Mike Kear [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 11:14 AM To: CF-Talk Subject: Reading CF-Talk pays off for me I thought I'd share a benefit that came from reading and learning from you wise people. About 2 years ago, I was reading about how it was important to separate content from logic, the appearance layer from the other layers. At the time this was a concept I hadn't seen voiced before but it made good sense. Until then, my Coldfusion had been making small interactive applications, that weren't connected together in any way. A user puts preferences in a page 1, clicks submit, page 2 executes a datasource query and displays a list of selections based on the user's preferences. I had few common files, and maintaining the common look and feel of all these apps was handled by using snippets in my CFStudio. I hadn't really grasped the full importance of using CFINCLUDE at that time. Then we came to reskin the site to update the appearance, and I decided that this new-fangled idea of separating presentation and content and logic was a good thing. So while we were reskinning the site I separated these elements out. I had a couple of different header.cfm includes, and two footer.cfm includes (with slightly different content). The reskinning then took about the same time as it would have if I'd gone through each of the 70+ apps and updated them with the new appearance. There were times I was wondering if there was really a point. Well this week I proved the point. Time came to update the site's appearance again. The site has about a dozen categories, and different colours and images, menu structures etc for each. Now there are 128 little colfusion applications. This time, to reskin the site I had to redo the header.cfm file, and the footer.cfm file, and tweak the application.cfm to query the SQLDatabase for the category colours, image names etc. The reskin happened with no more than 3 minutes down time, and took me less than a quarter of the time it did 2 years previously. And everything worked fine. We could have a designer give us a new design tomorrow, and I could have the site reflecting the new look the next morning. Thanks CF-TALKERS! Cheers, Michael Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia AFP Webworks. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Message: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm?link=i:4:137946 Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm?link=t:4 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm?link=s:4 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4 Your ad could be here. Monies from ads go to support these lists and provide more resources for the community. http://www.fusionauthority.com/ads.cfm