Please Read The CF Docs Before Posting!

I'm all for helping folks with their questions, that's why I prowl these forums.

However, over the last few months there have been some posts from people who seem to want the answer to a question without even attempting to determine the answer on their own first. CF has very good documentation, and the answer to virtually any basic question can be found there with minimal effort:

http://livedocs.macromedia.com/cold...ef=part_dev.htm

If you have a question about a tag or a function, please read the documentation first. If, after making an attempt to determine the answer, you still have problems, then post. Trust me on this: over time, you'll be far better off and more self-sufficient if you get used to looking for answers on your own first, and learn how to search and use the documentation. Thanks for your attention.

I disagree,
Coldfusion has horrible documentation when compared to PHP. Even worse, there is no search function, or at least that I can find in the more than 48 hours I have spent there. The documentation is also not color coded. Finally, the sample code does not represent all of the possiblities, and the output of the sample code is not provided.

However,
The documentation does work to some extent, especially for novices, if you already know the name of the tag or function your looking for. Alternativly the best source I know of is Google.

Tac, whether you think PHP has better documentation or not is totally irrelevant to this post. Please refrain from these sorts of comparisons as neither I, nor anyone else using CF, could care less what the PHP documentation looks like.

Further, you are totally wrong. The ColdFusion documentation crushes the PHP documentation. The PHP docs do little more than explain the functions. The CF docs are thousands of pages long and have massive sections on actually building applications and using CF in common scenarios. I suggest you go look through all of the documentation before you make any more absurd statements like this...it makes you look really uninformed.

And there is a search button right there in the table of contents of that link...you looked around for 48 hours and didn't notice that?!

Edit: You also won't find anything nearly as good as the CFMX 7 Snippet Explorer (part of the Getting Started Tutorial) in any of the PHP docs.

First Let me start of by mentioning that I am using CF MX 6.1. Therefor, I clicked you original link as follows:
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/cold.../6.1/index.html

If you go there, you will note that there is no search feature for CF 6.1 MX there, the second link you gave, which is not the same as the first, is for CF MX 7.0.

I like that coldfusion snippet link you gave, the only problem is that link never showed up in any of my google searches and I never found it while looking through the doc's on the tags. Many of those snippets are just explaining a tag like <cfoutput> or <cfquery> or an if/else statement, it would have been wonderful if Coldfusion included these code snippets and their output in the actual code documenation... for example here http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/6.1/htmldocs/tags-b19.htm#wp1102316

As for the PHP documentation, there is no need for the snippet explorer. First, each possible variation of a tag or if/else statement is given in the examples, and the output of each is explained there taking care of the snippet explorer's purpose. Secondly, for more advanced functions the comments are filled with comments, but there is no way I can argue that PHP's comments are more valuable to comments on Coldfusion documentation, although I seem to find many more with advanced functions and implementations that are just what I need.

With regard to the comments, which I would expand to include any related documentation beyond the simple tag and function descriptions, is exactly what the other 5000 pages of the CF documentation provide. Again, I promise you, there is nothing in the PHP docs even close to the depth of explanation contained in the Developer's Guide, Administrator's Guide, Getting Started Guide, etc. In fact I'd much rather read advice and explanations from the actual language creators than from random commentors.

But I digress...the real point of my reply was to completely refute your original statement that the "CF documentation is horrible", which as anyone who looks at it can see is just flat out false.

Half of the code written in adobe's docs is incorrect. There has been plenty of times I've scrolled down to the comments and someone posted a correction (if there are any comments at all)

The search is pathetic, sometimes I'm giving re the results for an older version of CF. Anyway, the most valuable resource I've found so far was http://cfquickdocs.com

cfquickdocs is a useful site (it is my first stop when looking something up), but it is the same content that is in the official CFML reference. They've just put a different interface on top of it.

There are always going to be errors in any documentation. I'm sorry, but saying it is "half wrong" is utterly absurd. The number of errors is tiny considering the gigantic amount of content (thousands of pages, between the CFML reference and the developer documentation).

Okay, saying "half wrong" maybe was little absurd, but I've found more incorrect documentation there than I have on any other programming documentation. I also get upset by the lack of participation on the docs. Hardly anyone posts ideas or functions like PHP.NET (Not to compare) But just look at the simple isset function in PHP (http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.isset.php ) and ASP.net always has something in their spotlight community. I just wish Adobe had more going on...Maybe I'm wrong...Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place

Generally, if I'm looking something up I'm always quick to pull up cfquickdocs or look through Ben Nadel or Coldfusion Jedi's Blogs. Those guys seem to know their CFML pretty well.

Maybe so.

There are hundreds of user defined functions at CFLib, and hundreds of full open-source projects at RIAForge!

I disagree,
Coldfusion has horrible documentation when compared to PHP. Even worse, there is no search function, or at least that I can find in the more than 48 hours I have spent there. The documentation is also not color coded. Finally, the sample code does not represent all of the possiblities, and the output of the sample code is not provided.

However,
The documentation does work to some extent, especially for novices, if you already know the name of the tag or function your looking for. Alternativly the best source I know of is Google.

I guess you missed the big search box at the top of the documentation pages? http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFus...ping/index.html