What's New With 4.0.0
ContentBox v4.0.0 is the first major release of ContentBox and it sports tons of new updates, improvements and bug fixes including a major upgrade to ColdBox v5.x which in itself gives us tons of new updates and features. So let's start exploring the major areas of improvement of this release.
The entire ContentBox core has been migrated to leverage ColdBox 5.x. This introduction has given us a plethora of features not only for development purposes but also great stability, and speed. The major areas of improvement are:
- Performance, performance, performance
- Container and Environment support and detection
- Full null support
- Inheritable entry points for Modules
- New modularity events
modules_app
inception- Default Module Exports
- Simplified URL Routes
- Enhanced Routers for core and modules
- Named Routes
- Event Caching Improvements
- Default JSON renderings
- Rendering Regions
- Faster Integration Testing
You can read all about the ColdBox 5 release here: https://coldbox.ortusbooks.com/intro/introduction/whats-new-with-5.0.0â
In 4.x, modules can leverage the full power of ColdBox Routing as each module has its own
Router.cfc
now. No more are you bound to just simple moduleEntryPoint/handler/action
URLs, you can now use the full expressive power of ColdBox Routes:cbadmin/{module-entry-point}/${Full URL Route}
Thanks to ColdBox 5, your ContentBox modules now support full inception of child modules. Even the children will respond to full URL routing using the pattern shown previously.
This is one of the major updates for this release in order to adhere to our containerization and portability strategies. Let's investigate the problem first:
In previous releases, custom code (media library, themes, widgets, and modules) had to be installed in specific folders inside of the
contentbox
module, which is installed by CommandBox.+ modules
+ contentbox
+ content
+ themes
+ modules_user
+ widgets
This is fine and dandy, but the issues arise once you want to put your custom code into source control but NOT the ContentBox source. It makes no sense to store the ContentBox source code in source control since the inception of CommandBox and package management. This created many issues in figuring out how to JUST add your custom pieces to source control and then came CommandBox 4 which allowed inline updates and just destroyed custom code.
Then came our containerization strategy where we wanted a simple mount point for all custom code. This was painful under the 3.x layout.
This gave way to the creation of the
contentbox-custom
module which is a module stored under the modules_app
convention. This module will store all custom code and can be stored in source control without interfering with ContentBox source code.+ modules_app
+ contentbox-custom
+ _content (media libary)
+ _modules (custom modules)
+ _themes (custom themes)
+ _widgets (custom widgets)
ModuleConfig.cfc
This also gave fruition to a new feature where now you can use the custom module for your custom media library, modules, themes and widgets, but also gave way to also store CommandBox controlled core modules and themes. This means that when you install modules and themes from ForgeBox they will install under the previous locations because they are managed by CommandBox.
You will also find the
ModuleConfig.cfc
in the root of your custom module with the basics to bootstrap the module by ContentBox. The rest is up to you. You can now leverage a full module to bootstrap all your custom code. You now have the power to control the loading/unloading of all your custom assets. Yeayyy for modularity.If you wanted to create custom widgets before you either had to place them in themes or in the core location. Now you can store them in the custom module under the
_widgets
folder and have them available globally.Since the addition of these new locations for widgets we have also added a discovery process when using widgets just by name in content markup or retrieval:
- Check custom location:
modules_app/contentbox-custom/_widgets
- Check active theme widgets folder
- Check core location:
modules/contentbox/widgets
The new custom module will also house your media library under the
_content
folder. The ContentBox v3 upgrader will move your library here (if it exists).If you are leveraging the CommandBox or ContentBox docker images, you can now easily mount your custom source code by just pointing it to the
modules_app/contentbox-custom
folder.docker run -p 8080:8080 \
-e express=true \
-v `pwd`/contentbox-db:/data/contentbox/db \
-v `pwd`/contentbox-custom:/app/modules_app/contentbox-custom \
ortussolutions/contentbox
We have now added the capability for users to enroll and unenroll in multi-factor authentication according to their provider of choice or admin's choice :)

Multi-Factor Enrollment
Tip: Admins can also un-enroll users as a fail-safe in order to allow them to re-enroll if needed.
- [CONTENTBOX-990] - quickLayout defaults to the contentbox module not the module the theme belongs to
- [CONTENTBOX-998] - When admin close the 'Quick View' pop-up the 'ContentBox Asset Chooser' also closed.
- [CONTENTBOX-999] - Do not show error message for expired content. Currently when I create expired Content Store Items. When the expiration happens I get an Error message. There should be no error message.
- [CONTENTBOX-976] - Allow for modules to exist in internal contentbox module and also in contentbox-custom/modules location
- [CONTENTBOX-1000] - ContentBox Module executions now support child modules and also full URL Routing
- [CONTENTBOX-971] - Improve two factor flow by adding enrollment and unenrollment screens and interface updates
- [CONTENTBOX-1007] - Contentbox installer doesn't allow you to select a special port for the datasource
- [CONTENTBOX-1010] - config and environment overrides are now reloaded if the settings cache is flushed.
Last modified 4yr ago