At best it’s been a learning experience. At worst, it’s been a nightmare. The basic site went up easily enough…all HTML. Then came time for the forum. First I tried Ray Camden’s open source forum, Galleon. Unfortunately several of the queries contain subqueries which are supported in MySQL 4.1 and up. Godaddy unfortunately is still running MySQL 4.0.24. In addition to that issue, there are also a number of disabled ColdFusion features including the inability to use CreateObject which is used liberally in Galleon. I changed all of the createobjects to cfinvokes and began rewriting the queries but it soon became a very tedious process and I decided to look for an alternate solution.

Next I attempted to download iPostMX, Cole Barksdale’s open source CF forum, but his site was having difficulties and I was unable to download the software. I gave up on CF for the time being and moved on to PHPBB which I was unable to install for reasons I was never able to surmise. Then it was CommunityServer, a wonderful community with a wealth of add-ons that comes free with a Godaddy account. The forums installed and after 2 escalated calls to Godaddy support I was able to use it. Unfortunately, I soon ran into a problem when I tried to use the Photo Gallery feature. Apparently the transaction log filled up and, because the database was not stored on my domain I was unable to truncate it and Godaddy was unwilling to assist.

Exasperated, I searched for another solution and came across Rick Root’s expansion of Galleon called CFMBB. It installed easily enough and Rick had already rewritten the problem Galleon queries. I then quickly converted the createobjects to cfinvokes (I had already done it once before when setting up Galleon so I had a good idea of what needed to be done). Pessimistically, I went to the site and to my pleasant surprise, it worked…for the most part anyway.

I ran into issues with calls to the java timeZone class and had to remove all references to that but all told it only took me a few hours to get it set up and working. I plan to write up my modifications soon for anyone to use. I couldn’t help but notice that I wasn’t the only disappointed Godaddy user out there as I Googled from one issue to the next.

In the meantime, if anyone reading this post is going through the same struggles I went through, leave a comment and I’ll be happy to help out!

-rG

PS: Special thanks to Brian Rinaldi for his assistance on several of the issues I was having and for providing such a fantastic open source CF list!