Open Source Update - BoomSocket coming soon?

It's time for another Open Source Update from Digital Positions! For those of you who missed Ben's announcement Digital Positions has finally come up with a new name for our Content Management System (CMS). Before you might have known the CMS as i3SiteTools but now you can re-introduce yourself to BoomSocket! Now the Bang (!) at the end there is totally optional but we really like the camel back spelling. Check out his post for more details and the new logo

So what else is new? Have we really spent the past months just on a logo, some colors and a new name? HECK NO! As Ben alluded to in his post there has been a lot of "man it would be cool if" moments around the office here. We've been spending a lot of time (when we aren't busy on billable client work of course) tossing these new features around and ironing out the kinks. We've deployed a couple of these "new" items into client sites who had a need and so far the response has been wonderful.

Most of the stuff we have coming down the pipes is stuff geared towards you the developer. We've taken our flagship Tool Builder tool and really pushed it to an all new level. Those of you who were lucky enough to check out our i3SiteTools presentation at ACFUG won't even recognize some parts of it. I'd love to spill the beans on what exactly we've done but Ben won't let me, so you can be mad at him.

Besides adding new functionality we've also rewritten a lot of the old stuff under the hood. i3SiteTools was originally started in CF4 and rewritten in CF5 but it hasn't fully adopted features from CFMX and later versions. So we've spent some time focusing on the most important parts of the code base to bring it up to date to take advantage of this stuff. Mainly moving code from custom tags and ::COUGH:: in-line queries ::COUGH:: to a more custom tag / CFC mixture and then adding some caching to frequently used items. With these changes we've seen some great improvements with the overall system speed and rendering of pages etc.

So what's the team been up to?

Our resident Flex man Darin has been busy on creating Flex based versions of some of the more popular tools and screens. These Flex pieces have really allowed us to do some cool stuff while maintaining a user experience which is well usable! We haven't decided 100% if we'll roll these out or not but at least those of you who are excited about Flex can hope!

Collen our wonderful CSS / JavaScript guru teamed up with Darin to completely rewrite the navigation tools we have been using in the past as well as writing the rendering code which will allow you to have a myriad of navigation display options out of the box. (text, image, static, dynamic and even CSS fly-outs!)

Ben has been busy working on a new design for the admin tools area as well as the "marketing" website. He's been extremely pleased with himself lately so we can only assume his designs rock. I've gotten to sneak a peak here and there and so far I'm pretty excited with what he's come up with.

So there you have it. Hopefully the next time I post here it will be to tell you about our alpha release! Which is hopefully arriving soon!