Galaxie Blog Update

What is Galaxie Blog?

Galaxie Blog is the most modern and functional open-source ColdFusion blog in the world. It is a free open-source ColdFusion blog platform with an HTML5 interface and a beautifully designed responsive site that works flawlessly on desktop or mobile.

Galaxie Blog is completely open-source!

Galaxie Bog is open-source. All of the functionality that you see here is free out of the box. Unlike other blog software, I will commit to providing full functionality without charging an upcharge for more advanced features.

The only exception to this is that the blog owner may want to purchase their own Kendo license to include certain Kendo professional widgets- such as the Kendo grid. Galaxie Blog supports both the open-source version of Kendo Core, or Kendo Professional- which requires a license. The blog owner may choose to purchase their own professional Kendo UI license directly from Telerik to unlock certain Kendo UI functionality, such as incorporating the Kendo UI Grid.

So far, I have incorporated open-source libraries from third parties (such as Kendo Core). I may eventually add a few more Kendo UI features that may require a professional license directly from Telerik. However, when I do decide to incorporate Kendo widgets requiring a paid license, I will always seek to provide similar free, open-source functionality by developing free alternative interfaces.

Everything on this blog, except the grid shown below, is free and open-sourced. Grid or no grid—this is a license thing that's totally up to you. I am not affiliated with Telerik and will not be receiving any compensation.

Current Status

I am currently working on re-architecting Galaxie Blog to use ColdFusion ORM. Without getting into the weeds of the technical details, ColdFusion ORM allows Galaxie Blog to support any modern database. This is a massive endeavor! All of the database-oriented logic needs to be completely redone. I am also working on helping several clients migrate to Galaxie Blog. I likely will not have a new version of Galaxie Blog out until the early spring of 2020 (on a side note- I likely won't be blogging as much in the next few months).

Tentative 2020 General Roadmap (subject to change, of course)

Version Date Description
1.75 Winter 2020 Re-engineer Galaxie Blog to use ColdFusion ORM. This will allow the blog owner to use Galaxie Blog with any modern database platform.
2.0 Spring 2020 Completely overhaul the administrative interface and develop a new HTML5 administrative interface that works with mobile devices
2.25 Summer 2020 Add functionality and rich editor widgets to the administrative interface. I want to be able to post a picture or a video along with a blog post using my mobile device. I'm currently investigating incorporating either TinyMce or CkEditor to allow blog owners and commenters to present their posts better.
2.50 Fall 2020 Develop Galaxie Blog into a Progressive Web Application.
3.0 Winter 2020 Incorporate ColdBox and Vue. ColdBox is the most popular ColdFusion MVC framework, and ColdBox has a much better ORM implementation. I am also really excited to use Vue (and ditch jQuery, which I am currently using). Vue should speed up the iterative development cycles and make the code more maintainable.
TBD TBD Galaxie Blog supports two commenting systems, the native Galaxie Blog interface and Disqus. However, the native Galaxie Blog interface does not have all of the features available in Disqus. It's my goal to make the core functionality of the native commenting interface comparable to the interfaces provided by Disqus. This requires having the blog handle Facebook and Twitter API logins.
TBD TBD Themes, themes, themes... Galaxie Blog already has dozens of professionally designed themes, but I will add more. I'll also add the capability of attaching a theme to a blog post, a page, and potentially a widget. I also want to implement a theme pack- for example, to automatically display pictures of the current holiday or event- i.e. Halloween or Christmas. Although this is not what most users would think about when addressing blog functionality, it is a fun feature and it improves user satisfaction.

Here is a fun little fact: Did you know that Ben Nadel, one of the most pre-eminent ColdFusion bloggers around, coded his site to allow the user to always choose to display a certain photo when viewing it? Ben's major theme is that he takes pictures with someone unique on most of his blog posts, and his readers can always select to view their own picture! Fun!
TBD TBD Improve user engagement. One of the biggest issues with blogging is that users will read your posts; however, they rarely, if ever, comment or provide feedback. I will develop an interface to allow any user, even if they are not logged in, to recommend and/or rate an article. Feedback is paramount to a successful blogger, and there is not really a good mechanism to allow quick feedback right now other than to go through the captcha process and make a comment.
TBD TBD Enhance and develop new mobile interfaces. Currently, Galaxie Blogs Plyr control can cast video from the iPhone to an enabled AirPlay device, for example, but I want to develop new interfaces that improve native Android and iPhone functionality.
TBD TBD Better code syntax highlighting. Currently, I use an older Java-based library created by Jason Delmore to wrap up the code in a GUI, but there are other more modern open-source libraries, such as Prism.

Note: This list is not complete, but it represents some of the major milestones and goals that I want to incorporate into the Galaxie Blog in the coming year.

If you would like to suggest any new features or just comment, please feel free to do so! I could always use any feedback or additional help!

I hope everyone had a good holiday season- Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and all that jazz!