Rob Wilkerson

Sometime today, in a fit of restlessness, I decided that I wanted to write a pod for Ray Camden's BlogCFC.  I think I had been writing too much Perl and it was affecting my judgment.  Anyway, writing the pod meant, first and foremost, installing BlogCFC in a development setting.  Although I read the installation instructions thoroughly (I think), I found several issues that either weren't mentioned explicitly or weren't mentioned at all.  I thought I'd write them out here so that someone else might be spared my last few hours of effort:

My Environment

• CentOS Linux
• Apache 2.0.59
• MySQL 5.0.27
  
• ColdFusion 7,0,2,142559
• BlogCFC 5.6.002

Notable Deviations

1. As the docs state, MySQL 5 does appear to work fine.  However, they reference an Adobe technote that provides instructions for installing a different MySQL JDBC driver than the one that ships with ColdFusion.  That article is a year old and specifically mentions that the 3.1.11 version of that driver and higher should not be installed in favor of 3.1.10 due to a MySQL bug.  I didn't see version 3.1.10 available for download so I just downloaded the 3.1.14 version.  That version seems to work fine.
2. The BlogCFC database creation scripts do not work for a default install of MySQL 5.  At least not entirely. 
   
1. The script does not create a new database.  That must either be added to the script or done manually by typing CREATE DATABASE blogdb where blogdb is whatever name you choose to use for the database.
   
2. Using the default install of MySQL, at least, the indexes that are scripted will not be created because of case sensitivity issues.  The tables are created using lowercase names while each index that is added to one of those tables references a headlessCamelCase version of the respective table name.  The script must be modified so that the case of the table names is consistent.
3. Lastly, the captcha feature didn't work for me.  The image was broken.  James Holmes pointed me in the right direction on the CF-Talk mailing list and led me to figure out that the /images/captcha/ directory - the directory where captcha images are written for display - didn't exist.  This wasn't a problem with the BlogCFC install, per se, but with my implementation of the install process.  The directory exists (albeit empty) in the zip archive, but when I copied it over, the empty directory was ignored.  Once I added the directory and ensured that my ColdFusion user had write access to it everything was fine.

I would only consider the second of those deviations (really the second item of the second deviation) a bug.  The first is simply a clarification and the third was really my own fault.  I should have been paying more attention during the copy process.

Hopefully someone else will find this helpful and be spared some time.