Learning Mura CMS
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.
So here we are, several weeks later, and the site – Femarelle, a treatment for menopause and bone health – is live and operational. In the next few days the forums (powered by Meld Forums, a commercial plugin for Mura) will also go live.
My experience with learning Mura have been overwhelmingly good. I would recommend The Mura Show – a collection of Adobe Connect presentations – as an excellent way to get a handle on Mura, especially the series walking Charlie Arehart through the process of converting his own site.
I also have nothing but praise for the Mura team. The forums are a good source of information and tips, and although they also offer paid support, they seem always willing to help users for free too. And on the few occasions when I ran into a bug or problem with the Mura code, a fix (and core update) was almost always provided within a day or so.
So there you have it – my whole-hearted recommendation to go and take Mura for a whirl. I’m sure I’ll be using Mura for many more sites in the future.
Comments
- Tony Garcia
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Yeah, Mura is pretty awesome and is backed by some really great people. They are offering a one day pre-conference training on April 21 before CFObjective() "A Programmer's Guide to Mura CMS"
http://www.getmura.com/index.cfm/blog/cfobjective-2010-pre-conference-training/
- 02 April 2010, 18:11
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- Mark Aplet
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I really like Mura, but have to admit I haven't even cracked it open in nearly a year. How would you rate the skinning process compared to Mango Blog? In my early attempts at using Mura, the skinning process was more work than it was worth for the particular projects. Curious how that has changed in recent versions.
Also, what about plugins? Given your experience with both Mango Blog and Mura, what did you think about the plugin architecture? Did you find it as easy to develop for?
- 02 April 2010, 19:29
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- Jose Galdamez
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That site is gorgeous and incredibly fast to boot. Great job! I also like how the URLs are very SEF. No /index.cfm/blog-post type stuff, you know?
- 05 April 2010, 15:22
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- George Murphy
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How did you get ride of the index.cfm page on your Mura site? I have seeen some documentation but have not been able to get it to work.
- 20 July 2010, 19:38
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- Jose Galdamez
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Hey George,
Getting rid of index.cfm is a two step process. First you set up your Web server (IIS or Apache) to translate URLs in the background. Then you update the Mura config and restart Mura. I was able to get it working for IIS.
Jose
- 20 July 2010, 19:41
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- George Murphy
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Hi Jose, I am currently on Windows 7 IIS 7.5 I tried importing the rules I was using for ColdBox on IIS 6.0 using Mod_Rewrite. I did this as an import and this is where I appear to be stuck. Would you mind letting me know what solution you are using on IIS and sharing the URL rewrite script.
- 21 July 2010, 07:29
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- Jose Galdamez
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Hey George,
What is your email? I can attach the config files so you can see how it's done. It's a two step process. First you have to set up URL rewriting for IIS. I happened to choose Microsoft's "URL Rewrite" plug-in. It's an easy wizard-style install. After that, you set up the rewrite rule, and then tell Mura to omit "index.cfm" from the URLs. I'm working on a Mura site now with clean URLs, and the URLs are looking superb!
Jose
- 22 July 2010, 14:56
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- George Murphy
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Hey Jose, I replyed to your post but I'm not sure if you received it. My email address is georgemurphy[at]websbygeorge.com
I look forward to seeing your setup files for Mura and configuration for URL Rewrite. I am using the same module in IIS 7.5.
Thanks!
- 23 July 2010, 15:02
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- mike
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Would you mind letting me know what solution you are using on IIS and sharing the URL rewrite script? O-o thanks!
- 25 August 2010, 14:45
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- Jose Galdamez
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@mike
I use URL Rewrite. The wizard makes it real easy to setup.
http://www.iis.net/download/urlrewrite
The web.config file generated by IIS at your webroot is the one you'll need to modify to insert the rule. It's really just XML. You just need to copy and paste this XML within the system.webServer tags.
<rewrite>
<rules>
<clear />
<rule name="Mura CMS admin" enabled="false">
<match url="(admin.*)" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="{R:1}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Insert index.cfm" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^(.*)$" ignoreCase="false" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
</conditions>
<action type="Rewrite" url="index.cfm/{PATH_INFO}" appendQueryString="true" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
It's easier than actually writing the rules by hand via the URL Rewrite wizard.
Next, the settings.ini.cfm file is located under the Mura "config" folder at the webroot. The only two settings that really matter are
indexfileinurls
and
siteidinurls
Both should be set to 0. Once this is done, Mura will attempt to load the framework using clean URLs. If the URL Rewrite works, then you're all set.
- 25 August 2010, 19:44
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- Greg
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How's the SEO practices related to Mura CMS? We are moving our main site this CMS since we are a Coldfusion centric shop.
- 25 October 2010, 15:57
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- Jose Galdamez
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@Greg
Mura CMS makes setting up clean URLs really easy. Once you figure out how to get rid of the index.cfm/foo/ URLs it's smooth sailing from there. The markup is also handled quite well.
- 25 October 2010, 16:04
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