Introducing Manager.cfc

I have been told by some people using DataMgr that it should handle files as well. The problem with that is that managing files is outside the purview of what DataMgr should do.

I actually do have another project called FileMgr (part of the com.sebtools package) that does a little bit of what DataMgr does, but for files. Mostly, it handles uploads and makes sure that the needed folders exist - one less thing to worry about on deployment.

What would be nice, is a component that works like DataMgr but handles files (and even image resizing) just as automatically as DataMgr handles data.

The component is (showing no imagination on my part) called Manager.cfc.

It will work on any database supported by DataMgr as well as handle files (it uses DataMgr and FileMgr). Unlike DataMgr, however, it cannot currently introspect the database and instead must have the meta data given to it.

While this requirement will certainly limit its use, it does come with a fair bit of extra power.

Any field can have a "folder" attribute and Manager will make sure that the folder exists. Manager also automatically renames any files to be safe for use in browsers and can automatically re-size any images and/or make thumbnails from those images and save the file names to the database.

Read the Manager documentation (more pages coming soon) for more about what Manager.cfc can do.

I have actually been using Manager.cfc since about December of 2007. I'm not sure why I have waited so long to blog about it, but even after using it for more than two years, I am still really excited about this project.

The documentation for Manager.cfc is not yet complete, but should be helpful. If you have any questions about it, feel free to contact me.

Manager.cfc is part of the com.sebtools package, all of which is open source and free for any use.