Tonight! If you want to kick back you heels and listen to an overview of FarCry there are several upcoming presentations that might be of interest. With the upcoming release of FarCry 5.0 (Fortress), these are the first opportunities to take a look at some of the latest features to come out of this vibrant community.

New Atlanta have open sourced their BlueDragon ColdFusion engine under the GPL2.0 open source license. Why do this? Will it work? How open will it be? What should we do? And what should Adobe do?

Daemon is throwing it's hat in the ring for this years, "Google Summer of Code", in an attempt to get the FarCry code base onto the program. It would be a first for ColdFusion, and with any luck we might get some great projects off the ground. But we need help!

One of the cool little unsung features of CFEclipse are dictionaries. Dictionaries are those little files that provide all the code hinting and insight for your CF tags, functions and scopes as you type. Daemonite Blair has been investigating clever ways to build dictionaries for FarCry Core and keep them automatically up to date.

Been fielding requests for recommendations on video formats, encoding, and compression? There's no simple answer, but maybe I can give you a starting point you can use with your upstream clients and their agencies.

XML style tags... I'm a sucker for their "completeness". -- it's a personal thing. Each to his own you say -- just make sure you write your custom tags to let me have things my way. Custom tags seem to be in the hinterland of ColdFusion development these days, but i just love 'em. If you're going to build them, build them right. Make sure that you can call them in "xml style".

Once a community project gathers some momentum, you need a formal process for managing issues and feature requests. No development team can hope to capture ideas, and bugs through a miasma of emails, forum posts and instant messages. Enter the bug database.

Documentation is the Achilles heel of many open source communities. At least Achilles got to rage through history before his untimely death -- open source projects are less romantic. For most developers, once you’ve scratched that itch, the thought of spending time not coding but documenting gives you an all over, body rash.

The number of participants in a particular open source forum, is just a fraction of the total number of developers actively using that product. Think of how many open source projects you use yourself, and compare that to the number of forums you actively participate in. Helping to ignite an open source community may be as simple as asking a few questions.

Eclipse has never been a fast starter. If you are using Pulse to manage your Eclipse installation you may be annoyed by the Pulse Launcher always asking for your choice of profile -- it certainly makes the whole start-up process unnecessarily painful. But you can nominate to start your profile directly and here is how.