As a part of yesterdays Reactor announcement I also announced ReactorBlog, a sample application which relies on both Reactor and Model-Glue. Late last night I upgraded my blog and Im now using my own blog software.
So far I think ReactorBlog is pretty cool, though I may be somewhat biased. In many ways its a clone of the functionally in Rays blog CFC. However, under the covers, ReactorBlog is quite a different beast.
Some things that makes ReactorBlog unique:
- ReactorBlog makes use of both Reactor and Model-Glue.
- ReactorBlog is more OO than Rays blog.
- Built in support for the Alagad Captcha Component to prevent blog span. (Youll need to buy your own license).
- Entries can be indexed into a Verity collection. And though its untested, you can configure the blogs search to search additional collections.
- Theres a nifty rating tool that readers can use to make you feel bad.
- ReactorBlog shows the number of views of entries.
- Rather than showing a calendar, ReactorBlog lists archives by month and year.
- ReactorBlog has interfaces for managing users and categories.
- Reactor Blog uses CSS to layout the site. (This is, of course, limited by capabilities with CSS.)
- You can print any page on the site to FlashPaper or PDF.
Some things that ReactorBlog is missing right now:
- Rays blog software has a nice system to unsubscribe from entries youve commented on. I need to add this at some point.
- Rays blog software has been internationalized. Frankly, Im just a bit too lazy to do this right now. Maybe, if people really want it, Ill add it.
As with any new software, there have been a few minor glitches here and there. I spent a good portion of today working though them and fixing. So far I think its pretty stable.
The biggest problem with ReactorBlog, in my opinion, is that its a flaming royal pain in ass (please pardon my explicative) to deploy in a directory thats not /ReactorSamples/Blog. To compensate for this shortcoming Ive added reasonably detailed step by step instructions on how to do this in the ReadMe.txt in the ReactorBlog root directory.
To get ReactorBlog, download Reactor and look in the ReactorSamples directory.
Please let me know what you think!
DougHughes.net 
Comments on: "Eat Your Own Dog Food" (8)
Glad to see another Joel on Software reader.
LikeLike
Great work, Doug. I think your new blog looks great..
LikeLike
Really great work! since I need a cfblog why not give reactorblog a try…
after some joggeling with mappings and component namings, I got the homepage running on mysql5.
then I run into some bugs:
[login]
Message The parameter APPEND to function forward is required but was not passed in.
E:mySitehtmlcontrollerUserController.cfc (38)
and some other suff in category entry. Do you want me to send a you list of what I found?
LikeLike
Daniel – I think the bugs in ReatorBlog have mostly been ironed out. Get the latest from SVN and give it another try.
LikeLike
Thanks Doug, I’ll continue testing and will report to the list.
LikeLike
Well… There are a few new ones that have cropped up related to categories. Hey, I do my best. 🙂
LikeLike
This looks very interesting Doug – will have to get back to this; along with Model-Glue.
Got me to thinking that maybe this could be used as a database migration tool:-
Point to one database, say ms-access, generate all the records(was beans), load all data, then change datasource to point to another database, maybe ms-sql, and save all data
LikeLike
Really nice posts. I will be checking back here regularly.
LikeLike