There are many types of hosting. The primary packages available are shared, virtual, managed, and dedicated. Shared hosting normally includes many features for a low price. This can be attractive but you may not need or use all those features. In a Virtual Server, you own a portion of a server, you get a certain percentage of processing time, disk space, bandwidth, etc. You have less risk of being affected by neighbors but you will typically need more technical expertise and effort.

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Macromedia's Chief Evangelist for ColdFusion, Ben Forta, spent the spring and early summer 2004 previewing the next generation of ColdFusion to user groups throughout North America. The pre-release name of the product is Blackstone and has a host of features that will be of interest to new and veteran ColdFusion and Flash programmers. Some of the major enhancements are: Wizards and enhancements for new CF'ers, major enhancement to CFFORM (key phrase: type = "flash"), introduction of CFDOCUMENT, and improved reporting with CFREPORT and a report creation tool.

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Content on the web often has a shelf life. You may have information that you want up after a certain point in time or you may want it to be gone after a certain time.You may want to have it appear and disappear without having to be editing files or changing out input in some back end system. You will find that you can build a simple system for publishing and removing info with ColdFusion's CFIF tag and CreateDateTime() and Now() functions.

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ColdFusion makes it easy to select data out of a database and display it on a page. As soon as you feel good about your success in crossing the divide from static to dynamic, someone will say "That's nice, can you group the list by author?". Whether you are asked to group things by author, make, brand, year or whatever, ColdFusion has you covered with its grouping capabilities.

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For anyone new to application development, you may be perplexed when you create your form for editing some data that should allow a user to uncheck a checkbox and update a record to a status of not checked. You will sooner or later discover an oddity about HTML forms. HTML forms won't allow you to uncheck like you think you should be able to. If you uncheck the checkbox, the value becomes NULL and the form doesn't bother to pass the field. You will find that ColdFusion does have a simple solution and much more with the CFPARAM tag.

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ColdFusion custom tags are ColdFusion templates just like any other CFML file but are designed to be reused. Coders can save much time by packaging code that is used frequently or can easily add functionality by using free or inexpensive custom tags. There are two general categories of custom tags, one uses only ColdFusion's CFML code. The other packages C++, Java, or other languages into a custom tag that is used by ColdFusion. We'll cover only CFML based tags in this article. For our discussion we will be using CF_States from AspiringGeek.com.

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We all start out learning ColdFusion by outputing variables using CFOUTPUT and some pound signs. A variable with an name like myvariable was passed to the page by a form or a link and output as #myvariable#. By not understanding and using scope, we unwittingly add inefficiencies to our code and overlook a lot of advantages that come with using scopes.

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As a newbie, you can expect to hear comments about "newbie tags". You may hear "Oh, I'd never use CFINSERT or CFUPDATE, I only use SQL within CFQUERY". If you follow a discussion on this you won't see any strong technical cases against them and when I've pushed the discussion, it ends up being admitted that problems haven't been seen since 4.5 but "SQL is much more flexible and powerful".

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