Guide: Building FarCry CMS permalinks with Helicon Ape on IIS7

FarCry CMS is a popular content management solution built with FarCry Core (a web application framework based on the ColdFusion language). As this software is quite popular these days, we want to illustrate to those interested how to operate SEO-friendly URLs in FarCry with the help of Helicon Ape.
Prerequirements: Windows 2008/Vista, IIS7, MySQL, ColdFusion, Helicon Ape.

Step 1. MySQL

After MySQL installation run MySQL Command Line Client and execute the following command:

create database farcrydatabase;

Step 2. ColdFusion

Install Adobe ColdFusion. Make sure ColdFusion is registered in IIS:

• open IIS Manager
• open Handler Mappings snap-in

• check if required handlers were added

Step 3. FarCry CMS

Download the latest version of FarCry CMS.

Unzip the installation package to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\farcry.
Create your project.
Specify project name, project folder and locale.

Select the FarCry CMS Datasource previously created in ColdFusion Administrator area.

Note: create your Datasource in ColdFusion Administrator area as shown below:

Standard FarCry URL looks like: index.cfm?objectid=E689D722-06DF-6D24-56726E44740068B5. Not a friendly URL at all…

After installation login to FarCry Administrator area, choose the Site section and Current Friendly URLs tab in the right side menu.

Click Manage button and add your SEO URL. Set Type of redirection to None and Redirect to to To the default FU because we don’t need a redirect, we only need to show the content of the real page.

We've just added friendly URL for our Support page but FarCry CMS says it is still not working.

We can check it by entering our SEO-friendly URL into the browser's address bar:

Now we'll eliminate this problem using Helicon APE. Download and install the latest version of Helicon APE. Launch Helicon APE and add these lines to .htaccess file in the root of your site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(^/farcry|^/webtop|^/flex2gateway|^/flashservices|^/cfide)($|/)
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ index.cfm?furl=/$1 [L,NC,QSA]

Save the config.
To make FarCry CMS apply these rules ColdFusion server needs to be restarted. So, go to ColdFusion installation folder (C:\ColdFusion8\) -> /bin/ and launch cfstop.bat file. Then start your ColdFusion server by launching cfstart.bat file.

 Now in Administrator area we can see that FarCry CMS has applied SEO-friendly URLs.

Visit your site to make sure that it is really true.

If the result resembles the one above, extend our congratulations – you’ve just set up SEO-friendly URLs for your FarCry site.

Regards, 
HeliconTech Team