Many years ago (early 2006 to be exact) the ColdFusion Cookbook was launched. The idea behind the site was simple. Provide a set of 'recipes' with clear solutions provided in ColdFusion. In some cases this was a bit like the regular documentation. (For example, "How do I parse RSS feeds?"). In others, the questions are more unique: How can you test to see if two arrays are the same?"

I'm a big believer in the cookbook format. For the most part, I can use regular documentation to grok technologies. But cookbooks allow you to see more real world examples.

In 2009, I decided to shut down the cookbook site when Adobe launched their own cookbooks (http://cookbooks.adobe.com). I got permission from the original submitters and donated the content to Adobe.

However, the cookbooks at Adobe will soon be switched to "read only" mode. I suppose you could call this "news" (I got permission to mention it), but because of this, I thought it might be nice to re-start the cookbook.

So I've removed the "We're dead" notice, slapped on some Disqus, and switched the search code to Solr. The code behind the site is... um... dusty. But it works. Most of the entries are not quite out of date, but I'll be taking volunteers to help do edits. (In fact, hell, it may even be worthwhile to relaunch as a wiki.)

I'll leave folks with a great blog post by Rob Brooks-Bilson. This is an old one too, but it helps describe the philosophy of what kind of content the site expects: A Word on the ColdFusion Cookbook Philosophy