Any developer who uses a CMS with a wysiwyg text editor knows the frustrations of clients pasting content from MS Word and other word processing programs directly into the editor, complete with unwanted styles, and even markup elements, causing all sorts of problems on our otherwise perfectly-formatted pages.

Mura CMS uses the ubiquitous CKeditor (formerly FCK) with a number of features enabled by default, including a "Paste as Plain Text" button. If clients remembered to use this, we would be all set. But, they don't.

Fortunately, there's an easy one-line fix.
Just open up [siteid]\includes\themes\[theme]\js\editor\styles.js

and paste in this line

CKEDITOR.config.forcePasteAsPlainText = true;

That's it. All pasting of content should now be clean, with extra styles and markup removed, just as if you had clicked "paste as plain text" in the editor toolbar. 

Here's a quick and easy enhancement you can make to the MuraCMS admin, adding links in the top-level navigation for quick and easy shortcuts to commonly-used sections of Site Manager.

Like so many things in Mura, the hooks already exist for this functionality, you just need to know what to put where. In this case, it is quite simple.

1. First, open up [siteid]/includes/eventhandler.cfc

2. Find the opening line <cfcomponent extends="mura.cfobject">, and paste these lines below it:

<cffunction name="onAdminModuleNav"> <cfargument name="event" /> <cfset var newLinks = ''> <cfsavecontent variable="newLinks"> <li><a href="index.cfm?fuseaction=cArch.list&siteid=... [shortened]">Blog Entries</a></li> <li><a href="index.cfm?fuseaction=cArch.list&siteid=... [shortened]">Photo Gallery</a></li> </cfsavecontent> <cfreturn newLinks /> </cffunction>

3. Change the <li><a> markup as needed, to insert the new links you want to create.
(In my examples above, I just copied the full URL from the admin view I wanted to link to.
There is probably a better way, dynamically generating the admin link by filename, but this works just fine, if your contentIDs stay intact.)

4. Save and upload the eventhandler.cfc, and reload the Mura application from within the admin - you should see the new links appear in your menu.

Some official Mura resources: 
http://docs.getmura.com/index.cfm/developer-guides/back-end-development/mapping-events-in-mura/

http://docs.getmura.com/developer-guides/back-end-development/plugins-event

One of the first things I wanted to know as I started working with Mura CMS templates, is how I can dump out all the available variables.

I'm used to the versatility of CFML's CFdump tag, outputting the contents of any query or other CF object to the page for easy reading and reference as I wire up the css and html to display the dynamic content. In Mura, where everything is returned by a 'bean' via specifically named CF functions, cfdump doesn't always have the expected results.

For example, in a content-driven page in mura, dumping out #$.content()# will show the methods available, but not the actual values they'll return for the page you're working on.

In comes another Mura one-liner "getAllValues()". This can be attached to almost any Mura root-level object, to show all the values available, just as if you were dumping out the results of a single cfquery record, struct or nested array.

So, to get all the available goodies for a standard page or content-based item, simply add the getAllValues() function at the end of your cfdump:

This also works for other Mura beans, such as a Mura feed:

or any record being parsed by Mura's "iterator":

or even the content of another page, by ID:

or by filename (the filename is the name of the content-node, same as seen in url):

As I understand it, most of these values are directly available via the CF request scope, but dumping out #request# in mura is huge, and takes a while to dig through. GetAllValues() is the one you want.

The Mura Docs list a number of methods for getting content via the Mura API. I believe the getAllValues() method can be used with all of the 'read' functions.

In my ongoing adventures w/ Mura ColdFusion CMS , I have been setting up a calendar of events for a local tourism website.  A 'calendar' is a built in content type in Mura, with many options for showing and filtering the content.

For this calendar, we want our events to show up as soon as they are entered, remain on the site until 2 days after the event date has passed , and then be removed from view. So, we need a filter that compares the current date to a date two days in the future - easy with ColdFusion's dateAdd() function, but the trick was getting that function into the Mura "filter" settings.

Here's how I set it up:

1) create the calendar

- in site manager, click the "+" next to home page (or wherever) and choose 'add calendar'

- give your calendar a title, and click 'publish' (other details can be added as desired)

2) create the "content collection" to show the calendar's info

- click 'content collections' , then select 'add new Local Index'

- give it a name

-  next to the heading "Choose content from section:", click the (less than obvious) "[select section]" link , and type in part of the name of your calendar to search for that content**

- in the search results, click the "+" on the far right to add your calendar, making sure "include features only" is set to "no"

** this has been one of the key Mura admin concepts I've had to adjust to - this type of content search is used a lot in the admin, rather than dropdowns or other standard ways of presenting existing selections. It works well once you get used to it.

3) set up the filtering

- on the "advanced filters" tab, add two filters, with the following selections:

i) Start Date / Time : Greater Than or Equal To : [mura]dateAdd('d',2,now())[/mura]

ii) Or : Stop Date / Time : Greater Than or Equal To : [mura]dateAdd('d',2,now())[/mura]

The key was the use of The Mura Tag , which allows you to use any standard CF functions in place of a static value ( documentation here ) - in this usage, we are comparing today's date to a date 2 days from now (if you wanted to be more specific you could add 48 hours instead of 2 days ... or anything you like )

As I am quickly learning, Mura contains a number of filtering options for its content collections. I'm interested in seeing your examples if you've got 'em!