Renegade Forums September wrap up

It is hard to believe September is almost over. I will be AFK next week, so the month is a wrap. I did manage to get a a few things done these last few weeks:

The next major piece to tackle will be adding in the ability to edit a post. Once that is done it will be time to tackle user registration.

Renegade Forums September Update

September has finally arrived, Count Chocula is on the store shelves, and hopefully the fall weather will soon arrive.

I have slowly been adding new features, but life comes at you fast; There have been doctor visits, health scares, surgeries, and recoveries in August. That is not to say that nothing has gotten done, it has just been at a much slower rate and many of the added features are things most people will never see. Here is the short list:

The initial sitemap code I deployed a few weeks back was failing validation. Those issues have now been fixed and the search engines are now happy.

User permissions have been added to the system. It is easy to setup role based permissions per user now although right now it is very rudimentary.

The forum admin now has the ability to create forums which is a step in the right direction, before I would manually have to add each forum to the database. The process automatically grants moderation permissions and subscribes the owner to the newly created forum.

More updates to follow!

Sitemap.xml support added

Renegade Forums now supports sitemap.xml creation support and will automatically generate a new sitemap every time a new post is added to any forum.

Renegade Forums update

Life has been hectic lately so I have not made a lot of progress recently, but here are the things I have been working on.

The main focus has been working on getting the feeds to lazy load. There is not a lot of content now, but it would be nice to support being able to load additional content items when the scroll gets beyond a certain point.

I figured sitemap.xml support might be helpful to help with having content indexed in search engines. I am working on getting that functionality baked in to the post save process.

I still have not opened up the user registration process to the general public. I want to make sure things are working before opening the flood gates.

Since this is more or less a side project I am doing in my free time I will roll all these features out as soon as they are ready.

Link posting changes in development branch

I have spent the better part of the last few days working on cleaning up the “spider” code that handles grabbing meta data from a post when sharing it as a link in the post editor. Code that works just fine locally running on CommandBox fails in production. Originally I thought it might be a case of OpenJDK vs Oracle, but upgrading the JVM on production didn't help.

After a bit more consideration, it is probably a case of WAFs blocking the DO ip blocks. Not much I can do about that aside from cleaning it up as much as I can.

The next thing to focus on will be getting account creation working.

A few new features

I have added a few new features recently:

That being said there is still a fair amount of work that needs to be done before account creation is generally available. Look for more updates to come soon.

Renegade Forums continued development

The last few weeks I have been trying to get the baseline system up and running. Currently there are rudimentary forums and the ability to create posts. Renegade Forums uses the cbantisamy plugin to sanitize user input.

I have also added the ability to post links on the site. Metadata for the links is read using the cbjsoup module for ColdBox. If the shared link is a YouTube video it will display as an embedded video.

Comments are probably the next major thing I will be working on. Once that is nailed down I will finish up the user registration.

Introducing my new side project

I spend a lot of time lurking around on the internet so I thought I would see if I could come up with a Reddit clone using ColdFusion/Lucee, ColdBox, and a few other assorted tools.