Blogfusion Development Blog

So if you read the previous post you know that BlogFusion has changed hands. So let me introduce myself. My name is Dave Livingston, and I am a Coldfuson Developer based out of Dallas, TX. I started using CF at version 3.1 and have been doing this whole interweb thing for about nine years. I have been pretty active in the CF world and have spoken at several CFUGS including Dallas, Austin, and Houston.  That's the short version if you want to know more stick around and I'm sure you will get to know me more through this blog.
Coming up next I'll chat about where BlogFusion is and where (I hope) it is going. We have some pretty exciting plans for BF including something specifically for the CF community.

You may have noticed that updates about BlogFusion 5 have been slow to come lately the last few weeks. Big changes are taking place with the BlogFusion project - all good things. Before I update you on the future, let me jump back to the past.

Way back in early 2003 I wanted to build a blog for my own personal ranting. Back then there were very few CF based blogging apps, and I decided to build my own. The result was the ugliest piece of hacked up code you've ever seen. Jake's blog app v1.0.

After repeated requests to sell the code, I cleaned it up and launched CF_Blog. This was v2.0.

Before I knew it, I had (newly titled) BlogFusion v3.0 launched. It was a much bigger app than v2 and it was full of holes. But by the time I hit v3.5 came along things were tight.

Version 4 was released last summer and has been getting very positive reviews since then. The release was pretty stable with only minor update fixes coming over the few months after that.

As I was working on developing version 5, I met two great guys - Dave and Jim. They could see the vision I had for BlogFusion and wanted to help make that vision a reality. We worked together on a couple of projects and things went great.

In fact, things went so well that I realized the plans for v6.0 would be well out of my programming league. When Dave and Jim approached me and asked if I would be interested in turning over the BlogFusion project to them, I jumped at the opportunity. They're a professional Web development team and have big plans and big ideas. More importantly, they have time during the day and mad programming skillz.

Oh, and did I mention that at this same time my wife found out she was pregnant with our first baby?

BlogFusion has been my baby. But there comes a time when it's time for the baby to leave home and head out into the world to truly grow. For BlogFusion to continue getting bigger and better, the project needs to sit in the hands of people with far more time and programming skills than me.

So by way of long winded history, I'd like to introduce you all to the new BlogFusion project leaders, Dave and Jim! They will be posting here on this blog soon with updates and details about the switchover.

Thanks everyone for your support these last several years. You've inspired me beyond belief with your encouragement, feedback, beta testing, bug reporting, and general interest in making BlogFusion better. I'm still around on my other blog (www.communityguy.com), and may even sign up to be a BlogFusion v5 beta tester. Hopefully Dave and Jim will accept me onto the team!

BlogFusion 5.0 Beta 4 testing is coming along nicely. We've identified a number of mostly small, a few big issues. All of them have been addressed, and committed back to the source code. There are now a couple of sites in near production stage, just about to launch.

I'm also working out the final bugs of the XMLRPC functionality. It's crazy how different all the applications are (ecto, BlogJet, Qumana, etc.) - each one has their own special way of doing things. Each one is picky about a different set of issues.

There is some big news coming down the pike in the near future, but in the meantime my hope is to get a Release Candidate out in the next week or so!