Seb Duggan

One of the great things about Mura - much like Mango - is its extensibility via its plugin architecture.

The basic user validation in Mura doesn't do much in the way of checking a username. It's required, and it cannot be the same as an existing username. That's as far as it goes.

If you have forums, or other public displays of usernames, you probably don't want users registering with a name containing "admin" or your company or product name. And one-letter usernames aren't great, either.

So, wanting a bit more, I set about writing a plugin - and just a few hours later, here it is, ready for release into the wild.

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A few weeks ago, I was landed with an emergency web project - due to a number of factors, I needed to design and build a fully functional product launch site with site membership, CMS facilities, integrated forums and a free trial signup process. In two and a half weeks.

I'd looked briefly at Mura CMS a while back, but didn't have a use for it at the time. This seemed the ideal project to implement Mura, if only the learning curve would be easy enough. So I took a day or two to install Mura, play with it, get to grips with the structure and conventions, and see if it fitted the task. A bit of a gamble, as if it wasn't a good fit then I'd have wasted two precious days, but well worth the effort.

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Now that the new release of jQuery 1.4 is settling down, it’s time to update my jQuery Mango plugin.

It doesn’t do much – just includes the jQuery library (version 1.4.2) into the head of your blog page.

Update: Plugin release 2 now includes the latest version of the BasePlugin cfc, to avoid error messages on upgrading.

Wow – it’s been a while since I last posted…

This is just a quickie – a reminder for my own reference, but could also be useful to others.

I’m building a shop, and the email confirmations include the line:

Your credit card statement will show a payment to "MYDOMAIN.COM".

Which is fine, except that many mail clients (e.g. Apple Mail) will take MYDOMAIN.COM and link it as a URL – which I don’t want.

To avoid this, simply add a zero width space into the “URL” – for instance:

Your credit card statement will show a payment to "MYDOMAIN​.COM".

(That’s the HTML version. If you’re generating a plain text alternative (using CFML, of course), you’ll want to use #Chr(8203)#).

The text will now look identical – except it will not be linked by the mail client.

When building a jQuery-enhanced site (or using any other JavaScript library, for that matter) I find one of the tasks I use jQuery for is to set the initial display states of various elements on the page.

For instance, you may have some elements that should only be displayed if JavaScript is enabled; and some which should be hidden. But what do you do to avoid the flash of unwanted content which may appear before various libraries load? Here's my solution...

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