One of the powers of the ColdFusion 8 tag CFPRESENTATION is that you can create presentations from dynamic database queries. A type of query introduced in Cold Fusion 8 is the CFFEED tag. This takes a feed (rss or atom) and turns it into a query that you can loop over as needed. Pairing the two together, following is a simple proof of concept that shows a series of slides using an RSS feed as the source.

The source for this example is a feed of Recently Redesigned Websites from the site eduStyle: Inspiration for Campus Web Designers. This was chosen as the source, as the feed output is very uniform, presenting two screenshot images and minimal but predictable text in the source of the feed.

First off, following is the pertinent code showing only the necessary CFFEED and CFPRESENTATION elements:

With this, it generates 15 swf slides, each representing a single entry from the feed source. If I want to do this in a week or a month, all I have to do is re-run the ColdFusion file and it will get results live from that point in time.

The best way to view this is to view the demonstration in a new browser window.

Alternately, you can also view an inline version of this presentation here.

One of the tags introduced in ColdFusion 8 is CFPRESENTATION, which allows you to create a Flash-based presentation that is very slick and can take full advantage of many ColdFusion tools. Also, once created, it's easy to tweak the content and render it anew.

For a recent talk I had to give, I used CFPRESENTATION mostly to learn more about it. Following are five tips from others trying this out, together with some thoughts about those considering it. In a separate post, I'll put up a simple proof of concept to show how it works.

Five Useful CFPRESENTATION Tips

1. Adding Attachments to a CFPresentation: As a mostly undocumented feature, you can add attachments to a presentation very easily. Attachments can be web links or file references
2. CFPresentation: Presenter image tips: design suggestions for including presenter photos and a logo in your presentation
3. Cool-feature-in-CFPRESENTATION: CF Guru Ray Camden shows a technique for storing presentations for offline use. I found that it works to set the directory path in the intro and then copy these from the server.
4. Tweaking CF 8 Presentations: Ben Forta points out tips on where to tweak some internal settings for a presentation done with CFPRESENTATION
5. Creating Slide Presentations: Adobe documentation and examples for creating a presentation with this tag

In my opinion, it's best not to think of this as a PowerPoint alternative. Instead, it's a slick way to create online (or offline) presentations where you want to include live content or render slides in a customizable manner. Output for presentations is stored as a series of SWF files. For this reason, don't expect to include hypertext links on your slides, as they won't work.

The rendered content is not as easy to control as standard web markup. When CFPRESENTATION converts images of webpages, it resizes everything to fit in a single screen. For this reason, slides with minimal text show larger type. Also, image presentation is a bit quirky. For example, I was unable to insert a JPEG in an HTML table with a width of 50% to balance text and graphics.

All in all, CFPRESENTATION is pretty useful, and it sure looks nice for the amount of code required (which is very minimal).