WhosOnCFC 2.2.0 to be Released Friday

Well, it has been an extremely busy blogging day for me.  Four posts in one day...  unheard of.

At any rate, instead of banging out an update every day or every other day, I have spent quite a bit of time to make sure I have all my ducks in a row before I publicly release this version.  There have been quite a few changes made in this version.  Some of the changes you can expect:

All configuration options for WhosOnCFC are now set in the application.cfm file and passed to the components init() function as an attribute collection.  You can omit the attribute collection if you want to use all the default values.

As noted before, all the features and functionality from whosonstats.cfc have all been rolled into whoson.cfc.  Now one component handles the whole shebang.  I also think it is important to note that while you can run the component with the showBots configuration set, I DO NOT recommend it on a production site.  I think you would probably find it surprising the amount of bot traffic a normal web site gets over the course of a day.  Having a few hundred sessions to plot out on the timeline viewer will cause it to become very slow and very unresponsive.  In order to help alleviate some of the mess, bots are now purged from the active user array every three hours as opposed to every 24 hours for normal clients.  This way you can still see who has currently crawled your site, but hopefully not bog the viewer down.

I was intending on scrapping the CF8 "Enhanced Viewer" in this version, but I know some of you still use it so I went ahead and cleaned up the code so it will work.  Please note that if you move the components from their default location you will have to make some changes to the files that reference the whosonProxy.cfc file, but I will write more about that later on.

If you are using WhosOnCFC on a "secured" site, I have changed the value returned from the WhosOnPageTracker() function from a numeric value to a string value that will be the name of the user that is tracked.  It defaults to Guest if the user is not recognized.

I cleaned up some of the files in the timeline directory and tried to add some error-checking in the data.cfm file that feeds Todd Sharp's excellent cfTimeline tag with XML data.  I have had issue with the data.cfm file not writing a complete XML document in some situations so now I have it in a conditional loop until it has a valid XML document.

There are some other things I am sure, they just slip my mind at the moment.  I plan on spending tomorrow doing some more testing to make sure everything is A-Ok and working on the documentation.  I have the current version running on several of my web sites and everything appears to be operating as it should.  I have not heard otherwise from any of the other users so I assume everything is copasetic.