Macromedia's CMS and Cold Fusion

November 05, 2002 | 5 Comments

I’m very interested in seeing what Macromedia has got cooking in the CMS arena. This sounds very interesting. We do a bit of work down at the hospital with Dreamweaver templates. Well, truth be told, I don’t use them much but Brian, our Web producer, does. He’s quite fond of them.

Anyway it sounds like it was well received at Macromedia’s DevCon and I’ve always been a big fan of Macromedia’s products. If anyone has any more info - or even better - if anyone was at the DevCon and got to see it, gimme the scoop, will ya?

Speaking of that, I’ve started work on a new project building a directory of services for the hospital. I think it’ll be a fun one, although a challenge. We’re planning on using Cold Fusion for this. I have quite a bit of experience with Cold Fusion, but it’s been a long time, and I’ve since moved away from backend development.

Today I got a look at the database, it’s in Access right now - Yikes - but we’ll be porting it to SQL Sever at some point I’m sure. Anyway, it’s also flat as a pancake and that presents many problems as some of the fields contain many types of data. There is an address field, for example. So you’d have the street, city, zip, etc. all crammed into one field. Things like that. This makes not only presentation of the information tricky, but maintenance and future flexibility a bit difficult as well.

I’m hoping to build out some of the fields into new tables and make it all relational - it might be tricky as it’s a legacy database with a process in place for updating, etc. I need to look at it some more try a few things out, etc. But I think with all the improvements that have been made with Dreamweaver MX and Cold Fusion MX I should be able to work something out that will take care of our present needs and set us up nicely for the future.

Filed under: Web Development