Migrating From Tag-Based CFML to CFScript: A Practical Refactoring Guide

You can migrate tag-based CFML to CFScript incrementally and safely, because since ColdFusion 11 you can use essentially all tags inside cfscript — Adobe publishes an official table mapping every tag to its script equivalent. The high-value conversions are the common ones: becomes a plain assignment, // become if/else if/else, becomes for/while, becomes function, / become try/catch, becomes queryExecute(), and becomes new http(). One current, critical caveat that changes how you should write script queries: the old "tags as script CFCs" approach (new Query()) was deprecated in ColdFusion 2018 and removed as of ColdFusion 2025 — so queryExecute() is the correct, future-proof way to run queries in script, not new Query(). The right strategy is not a big-bang rewrite: convert new code and CFCs (business logic) to script first, leave view/markup templates in tags where tags read better, and refactor file-by-file with a test suite guarding you. This guide gives the complete conversion reference and a safe migration plan.
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