FarCry

FarCry
Content Management System

from

Daemon Internet Consultants

"Content management applies technology to automate the most tedious parts of the old handcrafted approach. It helps you define a system for maintaining your site designs separately from your server code, which is kept separate from the content created by your authors. It provides the means and the opportunity to make your site into what you want it to be: usable, attractive, localized, accessible, fast, and up-to-date."

Chapter 1: "Foundations of CMS" of the Glasshaus title "Content Management Systems", ISBN 190415106X

Built from the ground up on the revolutionary Macromedia ColdFusion MX server platform, FarCry is the affordable, powerful site management solution that is quick to implement, and intuitive to use. FarCry offers the advanced features of high-end site-management solutions, including sophisticated publishing rules, version control and integrated search, at a small fraction of the cost.

FarCry CMS is open source and available for free under the Common Public License. Demand for FarCry has skyrocketed since Daemon's decision to go open source, and we continue to develop and enhance the product with the support of the FarCry community ( http://farcry.daemon.com.au/ ).

Built on the knowledge gained from years of experience developing content management solutions for enterprise clients, FarCry provides all the tools you need to quickly become productive. FarCry's tree view allows you to quickly prototype a site, and then rearranges the structure by simply dragging and dropping pages, files, images and even whole branches to suit your requirements. Changes you make are instantly reflected on the site without requiring time-consuming and costly technical expertise.

Once you have a basic site structure, non-technical knowledge workers can quickly become active contributors to an organisations Internet, Intranet or Extranet sites through the use of highly intuitive "wizards". These step-by-step guides are completely browser-based and available for all site management tasks including creating, updating, publishing, scheduling and analysing both location-specific and time-specific dynamic content.

Adding new functionality is as simple as plugging in additional pre-built or custom-built object types including events, facts, polls, competitions, FAQs, plus many more. All additional objects utilise a consistent workflow and look-and-feel, meaning little or no retraining of users.

FarCry supports an ever increasing number of rich text editors to suit all manner of deployments and budgets.

Site management in FarCry is as easy as drag and drop. Right-mouse click and context sensitive menus provide users with a plethora of editing options.

Any section of the website can be secured to provide extranet features, and permission sets for multiple content authoring teams responsible for different areas of the site.

Contributors can implement portal services via containers, and review draft content in situ on the live server.

Content object model for content storage across a variety of platforms. Developer tools for deploying and evolving content schemas.

Access to all objects is logged and in depth stats on user activity are available in real time, including locale.

Web site activity can be reported site wide, right down to the individual section or page in question.

Product at a glance
Product type	Content Management System Application Framework Open Source Services Model
Target Industry Sectors	All industries
Fault tolerance	General consumer
Innovation indicators	See below
Performance indicators	See below
Potential indicators	See below
Contact for more information	Geoff Bowers Managing Director

“FarCry is enterprise based content management system with a virtually infinite amount of flexibility that can serve the smallest to largest clients… FarCry is Daemon, FarCry is a community, FarCry is a blessing to any company needing a flexible and scalable CMS.”

Michael J. Sammut, CEO Four Eyes Productions, New York

FarCry CMS is a cutting edge application framework for web based content management that blends the very best of open source development with commercial backing and support.

The decision to release the FarCry code base to open source was done after very careful consideration for the potential business impact on Daemon. FarCry represents a turn around in philosophy for Daemon, moving from a license revenue focus to a service delivery model. Daemon invested significantly in determining the most appropriate open source licensing options and provisioning infrastructure to support and expand community contribution to the project. FarCry has been released under Common Public License v1.0

Key to the success of FarCry as a solution is Daemon’s investment in the developer community. Daemon provides disciplined code management, version control, issue tracking, reporting and support forums for users and developers alike. Although customers are actively encouraged to participate in ongoing development, Daemon acts as a benevolent dictator, having final say over what gets committed to the code base. Daemon provides a comprehensive set of services for official “milestone” releases, including extended warranty, customization and instructor based training.

The community investment has already had significant dividends in the form of increased services business for Daemon and a growing commitment from external developers to contribute development time in the form of bug fixes, enhancements and feature additions. Daemon collaborates with its major customers, focusing their development and quality assurance efforts.

Daemon’s target audience is mid-to-large enterprises. However, the volume of smaller customers forms an army of avid enthusiasts, all providing feedback on the project. There is a tremendous sense of morale and karma generated by providing these customers with an enterprise solution which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive.

FarCry is more than an enterprise-class application. FarCry is an “out of the box” open source solution, a fully extensible application framework, and a commercially supported services model.

“The FarCry solution, created by Daemon, has provided what is perhaps one of the most comprehensive and technically advanced solutions using Macromedia ColdFusion MX around. FarCry provided Curtin Business School an opportunity to develop a robust, fully customised content management system to support a progressive and complex website. Most importantly, the open source availability represented exceptional value, with CMS solutions of similar calibre priced in the order of $100,000.”

Michael Wall, Project Leader Curtin Business School, Curtin University of Technology

FarCry offers a novel object based approach to content management; the Content Object API or COAPI. Combined with information hierarchy management using the SQL nested tree mode, users can rapidly build site layouts and rearrange websites with simple drag & drop features. FarCry brings together a series of great technical ideas and abstracts them so they can be leveraged by novice and advanced programmers alike, using ColdFusion or Java.

FarCry is a proven enterprise solution released to open source. This gives the code base a maturity and discipline often missing in community development efforts. FarCry is in use in enterprises across Australia including Roche Pharmaceuticals, Bluescope Steel (formally BHP Steel), Integral Energy, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) and many more. Since the open source release, FarCry has been deployed in institutions and companies from Europe to America. The rapidly increasing footprint of installations worldwide is perhaps the best evidence of FarCry’s recognition as an enterprise quality system.

FarCry provides flexible deployment options across Windows, Linux, Solaris and Apple operating systems with a variety of Sun Certified J2EE application servers (including JRUN, Weblogics, Websphere and SunOne). FarCry supports MS SQL, Oracle and mySQL database platforms with more database servers planned. FarCry now represents the largest open source ColdFusion code base in the world.

Daemon has specifically engineered FarCry to isolate project specific code from the centrally shared “farcry_core” library. This empowers development teams to build customisations for their implementations without compelling companies to contribute to the core library. By maintaining a set of clearly defined APIs in the core library, Daemon ensures that developers can continue to benefit from improvements in the core library without constantly being required to revise their code to accommodate third-party changes.

Daemon’s role as a benevolent dictator ensures that the core libraries are maintained to a very high standard, backward compatibility is safe-guarded and that only those features considered applicable to a broad cross section of the developer community are incorporated. Daemon’s risk management policies (see Risk Minimisation in Other Information) provide transparency and detailed reporting across the entire code base, and provide professional quality assurance for milestone builds released into the public domain.

Just wanted to take this chance to say thanks for all the work that you and the Daemon team have put into FarCry this year. I have enjoyed contributing and hope that my input has been of benefit. I will continue to participate next year - even stronger I hope.

Gary Menzel, Web Development Manager, ABN AMRO Morgans Limited

A serious upfront commitment to excellence has led to an equivalent commitment from other development teams to the integrity of the underlying FarCry code base. The FarCry team released version 2.1 in January 2004 and the project shows no signs of slowing its pace of development.

As the number of installed sites increases so to does the success of Daemon’s commercial support model. Significantly, other development houses (in the UK, USA and Australia at least) are adopting the model and are using FarCry as the basis of their own commercial offerings. Furthermore, independent hosting companies are offering low cost, shared, ASP style FarCry solutions generating widespread, affordable access to the FarCry platform.

Daemon is identifying specific vertical markets for applications built on the FarCry application framework. We are developing a series of commercial applications for rent or purchase. Currently, these include:

FarCry is already fully Unicode compliant. We are collaborating with developers from several nations to develop a fully internationalized administration interface (with any number of translations and localization nuances) to further expand the appeal of FarCry CMS solutions to a wider, non-English speaking audience.

In the last year, FarCry has evolved from a closed, proprietary solution leveraged by an exclusive client list, to an open source content management platform used by a worldwide audience.

FarCry CMS Open source Community
The official website of the FarCry development community.
http://farcry.daemon.com.au/

FarCry CMS: Comprehensive Feature List
Feature list overview from a non-technical perspective. The FarCry Chief Architect explains how FarCry features address common business requirements.
http://farcry.daemon.com.au/go/features/faq-cms-features

A selection of FarCry websites in the wild
Recent additions include the ICAC, Integral Energy, Deschutes County Oregon (USA), Australand, AFTRS, Roche Pharmaceuticals and many more.
http://farcry.daemon.com.au/go/features/farcry-sites

Daemon Corporate Information
Daemon created FarCry CMS through over many years of development and released the code base to open source in April 2003.
http://www.daemon.com.au/

FarCry

Logo

Geoff Bowers
Managing Director
geoff@daemon.com.au

Daemon Pty Limited
Daemon Internet Consultants

17 Roslyn Gardens
Elizabeth Bay NSW 2011

(02) 9380 4162