News, tutorials, and release announcements for the Wheels CFML MVC framework.
A practical Wheels 4.0 guide to the full validation surface — conditional rules with condition/unless/when, custom validate() methods, enum() integration, and how to read the error API correctly. Built end-to-end around one User model, with every behavior grounded in the framework source.
A complete Wheels 4.0 routing guide — RESTful resources, nested resources via callback vs manual nested=true, and route model binding that resolves params.post before your action runs. Plus the sharp edges: route order, the protected-helper-names trap, and how a missing record 404s.
Wheels 4.0 ships a convention-based seeder built around seedOnce() — an idempotent helper that creates a record only if a matching one doesn't already exist, wrapped in a transaction that rolls the whole run back on any failure. This is the worked guide: file conventions, the CLI, composite uniqueness, and the sharp edges.
A user-facing how-to for the Wheels 4.0 DI container: register services in config/services.cfm with singleton/request/transient scopes, resolve them anywhere with service(), declare them in controllers with inject(), and let constructor auto-wiring fill in the rest.
A from-scratch guide to authoring custom middleware in Wheels 4.0 — the one-method interface, the singleton-per-app lifecycle and the thread-safety it demands, how to short-circuit, and how to register globally or per route.
A complete how-to on Wheels 4.0's paginationNav helper — the all-in-one nav, the bootstrap5/bootstrap4/tailwind preset system, the auto/always/never anchor tri-state, and the dev-time guardrails that catch typos before they ship.
A worked guide to Wheels 4.0's Server-Sent Events helpers — renderSSE for one-shot events, the initSSEStream/sendSSEEvent/closeSSEStream trio for long-lived streams, plus isSSERequest content negotiation, keep-alive heartbeats, and the engine-fragility sharp edges to test for.
Wheels 4.0 ships three model-side features that compose into one design: scopes name reusable query fragments, enums turn property values into auto-generated checkers and scopes, and the chainable query builder swaps raw WHERE strings for fluent, type-aware composition. This post walks all three through one worked example and surfaces the bug I hit while writing it.
Wheels 4.0.5 is out, and together with 4.0.4 it's one of the most substantial hardening passes on the 4.0 line — 100+ changes spanning security (open-redirect and info-disclosure fixes, fail-closed gates, SQL-surface tightening), warm-path performance, a much tougher `wheels deploy`, and Adobe CF / BoxLang cross-engine fixes. 4.0.5 then makes the whole thing installable the same way on every major platform — Homebrew, Scoop, apt, dnf — including arm64 Linux, verified daily.
Wheels 4.0 ships a stdio MCP server that exposes the CLI to AI editors — not as a chat sidekick, but as a tool surface a model can call. This post walks the architecture (reflection over a single CFC), builds a commenting feature end-to-end via Claude, and is honest about the config-template drift I hit while writing it.