since I am hosting strictly on Azure now (Azure Web Apps -- formerly Azure Websites), are there any other gotchas that you know about that will be problems hosting a Composite C1 site on Azure? (perhaps I should ask this in a separate thread)
Some good news; while investigating the issues with the Function Preview generation we launched a new Azure Web App and this work now :) I'm not aware of the infrastructure running there, but we created a new site in the South West US and the GDI+ block has gone. I assume this nice change has happened is across all data centers, but perhaps you would need to create a new site to experience it.
Is there a reason you are using PhantomJS instead of just rendering the page as a normal webpage in another window or tab?
The reason for using a static image, rather than the "live HTML" is that running N frames of live HTML within the visual editor could create all sorts of problems. The reason for PhantomJS is that this was the best tool for converting a browser rendering into an image that we have been able to find.
having not done a deep dive into the source code, would this be a relatively easy matter for another developer to develop an extension for or are there many tentacles to it?
I'm not sure I completely got your question, but the code that converts a function definition into an image is pretty isolated, both in a good sense and a bad one. In the good sense, the parts of C1 that does the work is pretty standalone (no tentacles) expect that is listens to changes to C1 Functions and styling, so cached images can be flushed to correctly reflect current look. It is isolated in the bad sense that we have not made any developer hooks in this area (except that the C1 Function can check if it is being rendered to produce a preview or not, see
http://docs.composite.net/Functions/Composite-C1-API/Rendering-Reason )
is it possible to simply disable the function previews in the editor and just show a function block instead (a setting that can be set in the web.config file)?
We will look into getting a switch into the next release (while trying to improve this area to the point where you don't really need to use it).
One last question: Can I use Azure SQL Server or are there any known issues using it with Composite C1? (I am also hoping there is no additional charge by Composite for this option -- I realize there is an Azure cost)
We support Azure SQL databases since version 3.0 and there are no additional costs.
I am really falling in love with Composite C1 as a CMS. The more of the product I experiment with, the more excited I get to play some more and I am really hoping that some of the relatively minor issues I've experienced so far will be smoothed out in future builds.
Yay!