Vote on the future of cfnuke
With so many questions for the community regarding the future of cfnuke I thought it might be best to use a series of polls asking for your feedback and help decide the future of cfnuke. I am considering rewriting the code to strip out much of the functionality of cfnuke that I feel is useless to most people. I don't mean for good, but rather for the next release. Let me explain.
After seeing how most people used cfnuke in the past. It was clear that the majority of people used it as a blogging tool with maybe a few special options. Some things I am considering putting the ax to at least for the time being are: Shotbox, Quotes, Reviews (same as news/blog), downloads, FAQ's, and member list. Let me explain why. The shoutbox was both database intensive, and useless unless you were on the homepage. It was also a haven for spammers to post their urls etc. Quotes, are sort of old and lame IMO. This may be best served as an option plugin module that if your site really needed it to be cool you could add it later. Reviews, and downloads could be handled as a blog post rather than a separate navigational link. This seams more appropriate. The member list needs to be gone. This is nothing but a meal ticket to a email harvester bot. It's ok to have people sign up for things, but no need to place their info on your site so you can brag about how many people have signed up to your site :)
For the most part, I am leaning towards making it a CSS and XHTML compliment blogging tool or pseudo CMS that would give users the ability to skin cfnuke in any manner conceivable. Also give users to create new pages and apply individual themes to those pages.
While I am on the topic of what I would like to do with cfnuke, I am thinking I wanted to add a new category system, RSS feeds, photo/video galleries, better polling features, more integration with trackbacks, twitter, and feeds from outside sources. These are all ideas for now, please let me know your thoughts by emailing me.
So lets start the first poll!
Next Question: to framework or not?
The next topic I would like to touch on, is weather to move cfnuke to a framework or not? I have used a few frameworks now, and though I see their usefulness in the grand scheme of things I found that they had a higher learning curve and not easy to get started with when your a newbie. I think that cfnuke is a great tool for newbies to pull apart and learn from. Or I think it could be. Much of the old code is poorly written with very little to no protection to the database. I believe the code could be rewritten to be safe, and set a good example for writing queries and doing it safely. So without further blathering, here is the poll.
MyCFNuke Will Return!
Hello, My name is Mark, and several years ago I helped create the original MyCFNuke website CMS and distributed it free of charge under the GPL license it was intended be distributed under. I put many many long nights into developing CFNuke. The many other programmers out there who have created software and poured your time and energy into something, can understand what it means and how important it is to keep this work free as it was intended.
I took CFNuke as far as I could take it at that time, then surrendered the project to Chris who also poured many hours into the project. Since then I have stood by and watched as the project degrade and later pointed to another developers servers who I though would again clean it up and and give it a good polish in hopes that CFNuke would again be a viable resource for developers and students learning to code in coldfusion. Sadly this was not the case.
So I am reinserting myself into the project and taking CFNuke back. It is my hope and dream that the software remain free to the public in it's full form. Not a free core application that does nothing as far as I can tell. with an option to buy modules at a premium. I will not stand by and allow this to happen to CFNuke. If this other developer wants to build on the original code to make an entirely new project and sell it that is fine. However MyCFNuke.com will no longer point to this other company, and will return soon. Free of charge, and free for all.
CALLING ON THE COMMUNITY
To get CFNuke back up to speed and back online I am calling on support from the coldfusion community. I would like to set up a SVN repository or a Google Code Project site and get this project back up. If your interested in helping or contributing in any way, please email me at
If you have final versions of CFNuke before the site went offline, including any patches please email them to me or let me know what those are so I can track them down. I greatly appreciate your contributions.