Introduction

Speck is a framework for building content managed web sites in ColdFusion. Although it does come with enough features to warrant being called a system, it was really designed to be a framework and it makes a lot more sense to think of it as such, otherwise you may wonder why it doesn't have x or y feature (answer; we've tried to make it easy to extend rather than include every feature possible because we can't accurately predict other people's requirements).

At the core of Speck is a framework for handling content definition, storage, retrieval and display. This core framework was designed in such a way that it could be plugged into larger systems and as a result, it comes with very few features, basically just the API for defining content types and managing content items, and a simple administration interface for editing content.

Over the years, we found ourselves using the same shared code and conventions when building web sites with Speck. This evolved into bunch of custom tags and other shared features which we called our portal framework (it was initially only used for building large portal style web sites). The portal framework adds the features that seem to be missing from the core framework (tools for managing users and site navigation, tags for rendering pages with breadcrumbs and menus etc.) and makes Speck a complete system (though still one that can be easily extended to address custom requirements).

If you are building a new web site using Speck, you should probably start with the portal framework. Unfortunately, it's not fully documented at the moment (we're trying to address that), but if you start with the demo application you should be able to figure it out pretty quickly.

One important thing to note regarding the portal framework is that all of the user interface strings are currently hard-coded in English. At some point, the features in the portal framework will be probably become optional features of the core Speck framework, but this problem has to be addressed before then, and it's not a priority for us at the moment (though any help would be appreciated).