If I’m a designer working with engineers on design of a site being engineered with Cold Fusion, how much working knowledge do I need to have of Cold Fusion to be able to direct the look and feel of the site? If there is a need to have a working knowledge of Cold Fusion to be able to design the look and feel of the web site, about how long, on average, would a person need to be tutored/ take class in Cold Fusion to reach that level of competency?
The learning curve for cold fusion is infinitely steep, because it doesn’t work. No matter how much you learn, you won’t be able to do cold fusion. You are currently involved in a scam. Get out, ASAP.
Chronos is surely right about the cold fusion part not working.
But hey, if they have cash up front for the web work… Might as well take it from them. Don’t do a damn thing, before you have payment.
Uh…guys? I think the OP is referring to the web development tool (called, coincidently enough, Cold Fusion), not the bogus physics project. See here for the release notes.
Unfortunately, I know nothing about Cold Fusion, so I am no help to the OP.
Oh, thanks DF.
Reading it in that light… Ignore the last.
Funny I read it that way too, cuz I am in the industry. I don’t work with the Cold Fusion product though. Mostly doing .Net and J2EE stuff now.
Can you work in any server sided scripting language? ASP, JSP, PHP? This should be more of the same. The technique from the design side you be very similar.
Hopefully someone who has used will be along shortly.
Heh. After reading Chronos’ post, I was thinking “Jesus, this must be the buggiest web development tool ever released.” 
I’ve developed in .ASP and Cold Fusion, and I find Cold Fusion so much easier to use. All other things being equal, I can set up a CF site in much shorter time than with .ASP.
As some other posters asked, if you have programming experience in PHP, .ASP or similar, CF is a snap.
CF is moving towards a Java-type system with CF5 and I have no experience there. Having said that, the CF support community is very large, very helpful and has developed their own support tools to make the job even easier and more robut. You might want to look into the application system known as FuseBox with your CF applications. And more often than not, quite a few CF support applications are free.
Thanks, folks (especially for the laughs when you thought I meant REAL cold fusion…!)
However, I’m not really looking to begin using Cold Fusion to actually put web sites together. Maybe I should rephrase the question:
If the engineers that I work with use Cold Fusion, and I’m trained in design but not inn engineering or writing code beyond really simple stuff, how much of Cold Fusion would I need to know as a designer (a trained, professional designer) to be able to give the engineers what I want as far as the look and feel of the web site and have them be able to implement the visual design?
For example, let’s say I make a series of Photoshop documents and I say, “I want the main page to look like Page A, and then I’d like to be able to click on this link and go to pages that look like page B; on page B I’d like to be able to have a 164 x 164 pixel JPEG or GIF graphic that I can change every week, and I’d like to be able to have this list of features on each page…” Could I do that and reasonably expect that the engineers could create pages that capture the look and feel of the Photoshop docs? Are there limitations to Cold Fusion that would restrict this method of designing the look and feel of the site, limitations that I would need to know as a designer so that I don’t end up asking the engineers to do something that is not possible in Cold Fusion?
I’m a designer who has just spent the last couple of months learning ColdFusion to increase my skill set, and also so that I can set up a simple content management system for some of my clients so that they can update things like press releases and job postings themselves, and let me do other things. How I’ve been working is to do the site design as I’ve done before then cut the HTMP pages up and inserted CF code where necessary.
So, to answer your question, essentially, there are no limitations on how you can design for a ColdFusion enabled site. Anything you can put together in Photoshop can be coded as a regular old page.
ColdFusion allows content and design to be separated. The design is taken care of by things such as included HTML, and when ColdFusion generates the site pages it melds the information from the underlying site database with the design you have put together, and creates seamless HTML pages.
What I would recommend is that you read up a little on Cold Fusion to get an appreciation of what very interesting functionality it allows your pages to have, and how it can save time on design and coding by allowing you to make templates and site-wide navigation elements. But as for designing the pages, don’t worry…
Thanks, rubberdemon; I think that pretty much answers the question!
Be sure to watch for my forthcoming product, Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
Chronos, your post makes no sense. The ‘infinitely steep learning curve’ you postulate for cold fusion means you understand all about it in zero time. IOW, you go from making arbitrarily many errors to no errors at all with no time between.
Think about it: A learning curve is plotted on a graph such that ‘amount of errors’ is on the y-axis and ‘time’ is on the x-axis. ‘Infinite slope’ means a vertical line, which in this case means a vertical line coincident with the x-axis, or the line x = 0.
What you must have meant was a line with zero slope, or the line y = Infinity.
Carry on. 
Derleth, the other way of looking at that is you know as much as you know right when you start. Since there is nothing to know about cold fusion it takes no time to learn it and thus you are dividing by zero. [touché]
Perhaps he was wrong about the learning curve as well as thinking that I was referring to actual cold fusion, but at least he thought he was posting on-topic…
Interesting, except that that isn’t how learning curves work. Reread my post: A learning curve is plotting the variance of amount of mistakes made over time. With something impossible to learn, you can’t acquire any new information and thus you can never reduce the amount of ‘mistakes’ you make (mistakes quoted because they aren’t correctable as real mistakes are). Therefore, a horizontal line.
(I know I’m being pedantic here, and that I’m utterly misconstruing a joke. This is a place where being pedantic is good. :D)
(BTW: Good to know standard HTML character-escapes work. We’ll have to dredge up that old thread, assuming it still exists.)
And here, I always thought that the slope of the learning curve was proportional to the difficulty of learning. You know, an uphill climb and all that. You learn something new every day.