Blogging capabilities are essential component for any web site and web application. Blog entries help provide more context around products, services. It inherently creates more on-line presence and, if managed properly, better search engines results.

ContentBox comes with a built-in blog which you can turn ON and OFF from System > Settings. The default setting is ON.

The main Blog page in your ContentBox Administrator shows a table with all your blog posts. We have 3 useful indicators.

• Shows if your post has been published

• Shows the numbers of views

• Shows the number of comments

And you also have quick actions:

Where you can check the info related to each individual post

And entry actions

ContentBox is a CMS built by developers, for our own use. We obviously try and cater to the usual CMS functionality features, but being developers, we tried to throw a couple of extra goodies into ContentBox.

In this section we'll give you a few tips about the different editors available and some of the features common to all of the editors.

Developers are getting more and more familiar with Markdown, and it's actually preferred by a lot of developers when it comes to writing documentation and blog posts, and that is why we give you native support of Markdown in the ContentBox editor. We also threw in a few other features when adding support, some might just save you hours of work.

We have included a new code editor that supports HTML and Markdown natively. This will allow developers or editors to write in native markup and have all the integrations into ContentBox.

The new editor also sports real time previews and side-by-side editing in full screen. Your editing experience is about to get a whole lot better now.

Running a website, on top of your normal job duties can be a lot of work. Time is valuable, and important when trying to plan your content and the corresponding social media publication. This is the reason why we created an important ( but often overlooked ) feature, Publication and Expiration dates for content. You might be surprised what in ContentBox is date controlled.

Blog Posts

This is most useful when scheduling blog posts. Blog posts can take a long time to write, and post, and with busy schedules this might not get done. This is why at Ortus Solutions, we try to write our blog posts, and schedule them ahead of time. When editing a blog post, in the right hand side 'sidebar', you will see these options at the top of the sidebar.

You can set the publish date / time, and the post will go live at the right time for you.

Expiration dates are useful too, but not a normal use case for blog posts… but these scheduling options are not just available for blog posts. Expiration dates work great for webinars or other events, where a sign up page should be removed after event sign ups close, or maybe a special or promotion that should only who while it's active. This will even show and hide menu items in your navigation.

Pages

Lets look at the Page Details version of the Publishing options

As you can see, they are exactly the same. This makes it familiar and easy to work with. This is also the case for Content Store items… which gives you even more options in regards to scheduling content.

Content Store Items

ContentStore items can be included inside of pages and blog posts too, which means you can include a time based piece of content into your homepage, to show upcoming events, or show a link to a sign up page for event, and then hide the link when the registration period is over.

This is a nice feature, which at the surface looks simple but useful, but with this feature working with ContentStore items as well, the options are endless.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of widgets you can use in ContentBox. Most widgets have specific and larger functionality… sometimes you might want something quick and simple… like outputting a single variable. You can output any RC or PRC variable with a simple helper function.

What does RC and PRC mean:

• RC - Request Collection

• PRC - Private Request Collection

The underlying framework (ColdBox) will merge the incoming URL/FORM/REMOTE variables into a single structure called the request collection structure that will live inside the request context object. We also internally create a second collection called the private request collection that is useful to store data and objects that have no outside effect.

Syntax

The code below allows you to easily output from any of these source:

${rc:name}

This will output the name variable from the RC scope.

Accessing URL Variables

This means you can output URL variables in your content. Look at this example, with the following url

mydomain.com/?name=Gavin Pickin

You could access the name with ${rc:name}

You can tap into more items in the RC and PRC scopes as well, but you have to remember, you cannot output a struct to the page, only strings.

This gives you some nice options for form submissions, searches, and ways to add more information to a normal pages if you write your own modules.

Escaping Dynamic Output

If you actually want to use the text above, without trying to output a variable, you can escape the code.

<escape>${rc:name}</escape>

If you do not escape the variables, and the variable doesn't exist, you'll see an error message like this:

Error translating setting on target prc:page.renderContent(): The variable: page.renderContent() is undefined in the request collection (private=true) Keys Found: META,currentLayout,CBENTRYPOINT,currentRoutedURL,layoutmodule,currentView,CBROOT,layoutoverride,CBWIDGETROOT,CBSETTINGS,COMMENTSCOUNT,CATEGORIES,cbox_incomingContextHash,currentRoute,CBADMINENTRYPOINT,COMMENTS,PAGEOVERRIDE,OCURRENTAUTHOR,CBTHEME,CBTHEMEROOT,currentViewArgs,PAGE,viewModule Error translating setting on target rc:lastname: The variable: lastname is undefined in the request collection (private=false) Keys Found: namespaceRouting,event,pageSlug,format,namespace

Settings

Any setting stored in ContentBox can be output using the following markup: ${setting_name}. This is a great way to create site-wide static settings that can be output in any editor.

Editor Auto Save

We have introduced local storage auto saving capabilities for all editors in ContentBox. No matter the implementation, we will provide auto-save capabilities. This is a great way to know that silently your work is secure. I don't know how many times I select all and type by mistake. This feature has saved my bacon, and now you know about it, it could save you too. Editor

Escaping Markup Translations

With any Bulletin Board Forum, or CMS, they each have their own syntax for special markup. You can now use the <escape></escape> syntax in any content editor to escape ContentBox translations for settings, markdown, etc.

Editor Responsive Previews

All live previews are now responsive. Meaning you can choose from the responsive previewer the type of device and get immediate feedback of the content result in real-time.

Editor UI Updates

The content editors have completely been re-designed for mobile first paradigm. They sport new tabbed interfaces for history, comments, custom fields and editing. You also have much more real estate when editing and even full screen editing support… including auto shrinking the left side bar, with an option to shrink the right sidebar too.

ContentBox allows you to create and publish content directly from the Administrator. There are two main sections where you can do this

• Blog | You can create and publish blog posts.

• Sitemap | You can create and publish pages