In this section, you will find the release notes for each version we release under this major version. If you are looking for the release notes of previous major versions, use the version switcher at the top left of this documentation book. Here is a breakdown of our major version releases.

Version 6.0

Version 6 is a major architectural shift for ContentBox as we expand its API headless capabilities, introduce content templates, upgrade to ColdBox7, solidify the multi-site core, and much more.

Version 5.0

Version 5 is a major architectural shift for ContentBox as we go Multi-Site and Hybrid headless API, upgrade to ColdBox6, with over 145 improvements and new features.

Version 4.0

Version 4 focused on upgrading its internal core to ColdBox 5 and providing more modular development around its core. We introduced the contentbox-custom module so you can have your assets externalized from the CMS core. We also added tons of security features, such as two-factor authentication.

Version 3.0

Version 3 also focused on a major ColdBox upgrade and a new admin interface.

Version 2.0

In this version, we introduced the content hierarchy and pages. It was a major leap to a full-fledged CMS.

Version 1.0

Our initial CMS release

Across the top of the ContentBox Dashboard is the header bar. Let's take a look at the icons and buttons, from left to right. On the upper left, next to the ContentBox logo (which will return you to the dashboard), is a button that allows you to toggle the menu. Clicking this button allows the main content of the page to occupy more real estate. To the right of this button is a robust global search feature that categorizes your search results into ContentStore, Page, and User.

In the upper right corner of the header are four buttons. The first is the House icon which takes you to the active site's homepage. To its right is the Plus icon, which allows you to add content, including new pages, new content store items, new users, new media, and new menus. The third button, second from right, is a Gear icon which allows you to perform cache-clearing functions, including RSS caches, content caches, the template cache, and more. You can also reload ORM as well. You can even reload every single module that you have available at ContentBox - your entire application - from this menu.

In the main section of the Dashboard you have three tabs: Content Reports, Recent Comments, and Recent News. The data in the Content Reports tab contains your latest edits, followed by other types of content: Future Published, Expired, and Drafts.

To the right of the main, three-tabbed section you can find the right panel, which is divided up into three sections: Data Snapshots, Latest Logins, and a Help Section. Under the first section, Data Snapshots, you can check on the Top Hits & Comments, Discussion Counts, and Content Counts. These expandable menu selections allow you to drill down to get more detail on your site's popular pages, pending approvals, and other important statistics.

Everything you see through the site has what we call a Quick View. By right-clicking on any instance you can get the content immediately as a Quick View so you can edit or actually view it and see the content within. Note: You can’t Quick View the Content Store.

The Administrator Module Login Screen

The login URL to use to access the ContentBox administration module is:

https://your.domain.com/cbadmin/

You will need to use the username and password that you created during install, or one that your system administrator has provided for you.

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.

Our about page is very useful. Apart from your build information, it contains keyboard shortcuts! ContentBox has a lot of keyboard shortcuts available for you, and once they are memorized, you can easily navigate using them. Also, for you module developers, we have an API based on a jquery javascript library. You can do data binding for your own shortcuts, so it's very easy if you want to offer your own keyboard shortcuts.

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

[Content + Media manager] Media manager is an embedded media manager that we ship with ColdBox. If you are an administrator you have different libraries [Switch Library drop down menu; top right] that you can manage. For example, [click widgets in the DDM] you can manage the widgets, so you can install manually other widgets or download some of the widgets that you have available here.

[Switch Library + Update] You can check out the auto update channel so you can actually do any type of modifications. It’s up to you what you want to do with this [switch to list view]. Obviously, an administrator can choose all the different things [select new ‘blog folder’ & click X to delete] and all different permissions. You can do this [hover in circle] as well.

• [Snyk] Upgrade webpack from 5.90.0 to 5.90.1 by @lmajano in #604

• Bump follow-redirects from 1.15.4 to 1.15.6 by @dependabot[bot] in #605

• [Snyk] Upgrade alpinejs from 3.13.5 to 3.13.6 by @lmajano in #606

• [Snyk] Upgrade @alpinejs/focus from 3.13.5 to 3.13.6 by in

• Bump braces from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3 by [bot] in

• Update RateLimiter.cfc, fix for CONTENTBOX-1512 by in

• Resolve CONTENTBOX-1511 by in

• Fix_postgres_quoted_columns by in

• Update seed_permissions.cfc by in

• CONTENTBOX-1517 Update SecurityValidator.cfc by in

• Bump cross-spawn from 7.0.3 to 7.0.6 in /modules/contentbox/themes/default by [bot] in

• Bump webpack from 5.89.0 to 5.94.0 by [bot] in

• Bump nanoid from 3.3.6 to 3.3.8 in /modules/contentbox/themes/default by [bot] in

• Bump braces from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3 in /modules/contentbox/themes/default by [bot] in

• Patch/performance fixes by in

• Bump webpack from 5.90.1 to 5.97.1 in /modules/contentbox/themes/default by [bot] in

• fix: update user-agent bots regex by in

• Bump serialize-javascript and mocha by [bot] in

• Bump serialize-javascript from 6.0.1 to 6.0.2 in /modules/contentbox/themes/default by [bot] in

• CONTENTBOX-1524 index names have to be unique with postgres, so rename idx_deleted by in

• Bump @babel/runtime from 7.18.3 to 7.26.10 in /modules/contentbox/themes/default by [bot] in

• Bump @babel/helpers from 7.18.2 to 7.26.10 in /modules/contentbox/themes/default by [bot] in

• Bump brace-expansion from 1.1.11 to 1.1.12 in /modules/contentbox/themes/default by [bot] in

• by in

• Bump brace-expansion from 1.1.11 to 1.1.1

• ACF Compatibility Updates

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.

Often, there are items which a user wishes to be dynamic in a content layout, template or even a custom view. The ContentBox Content Store allows you to create and group these reusable elements.

Let's say, for example, that you wish to include a block of Contact information in the footer of your site. You could code that directly in to your , but by using the Content Store, you make that content easily editable by Editors and Administrators of your site.

To create Content Store custom content, navigate to Content > Content Store in the sidebar menu and click the "Create Content" button. Then provide your custom content in the editor.

Note the slug value in the editor. You will use this slug to retreive the custom content item in your layout.

Open your them layout or footer view and insert the custom content reference using the shorthand annotation like so:

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.

Bug

featuredIMage URL on initial migration should be nullable

ContentBox Modular CMS - v6.x

ContentBox is a professional open-source hybrid modular CMS (Content Management System) that allows you to easily build websites, blogs, wikis, complex web applications, and even power mobile or cloud applications. Built with a secure and flexible modular core, designed to scale, and combined with world-class support, ContentBox will quickly get your projects out the door.

What are modules

Modules are self contained bundles of code, that contain their own configuration, routes, handlers, views, widgets, interceptors, and can contain other modules. They are a vital part of ContentBox, and the ease in which you can use, and develop for ContentBox.

Contentbox has many options for creating and managing content, which are accessible through the ContentBox Administrator:

1. Blog entries

2. Categories

3. Content Store Items

Apart from the widgets you also have the ability to insert entries from the Content Store [contentstore icon], to link to specific pages [ link icon], or to link to a specific entry [pencil icon]. You can also insert different media items and images [image icon].

For example, to link a few words [select a word from TEXT] to a specific page, highlight the desired words and click the [Link Page] icon. This will display a list of all pages in ContentBox from which you can choose the desired page to link to and even specify whether the link should be SSL or not. The same can be done with ContentBox blog entries.

You can also insert from the Content Store [ccontentstore icon]. You can try inserting something from the Content Store you will see it creates a kind of pseudo Markup. ContentBox will automatically render this content when the page is viewed.

Hint [clicking the eye or type CTRL+P] to get a preview and to actually see the translation of that markup.

As an administrator here you have full control of how this editor looks like. So for example right now you are seeing every single option known to man. However, you can basically limit this for editors. You can limit actually all the controls that you are seeing. So you have all control of how everything looks and feels. So if you need to make it simpler you can really do so very easily.

ContentBox 3.1 now supports the generation of static sites from your content and even your blog. This is a great addition to ContentBox as now you can produce static versions and workflows, deploy to CDN networks, secure your content and much more. Once you click on the Start Generation button, ContentBox will go over your entire site and produce a static archive for you in the associated theme. It will also announce two interception points for you during the process:

• cbadmin_preStaticSiteExport : Receives all the export options in the intercept data so you can alter the export behavior.

Layouts Folder File Structure

• layouts (The folder that contains layouts in your theme)

Login Tracker and Lockout

The ContentBox administrator module now comes with a login tracker which if enabled can track invalid logins and be able to block individual ip addresses from brute-force attempts. We even track all valid logins into the new ContentBox Security Audit Log.

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.

We are so excited you are here and ready to get started with ContentBox Modular CMS one of the most modern ColdFusion (CFML) Content Management Platforms. There are several ways to install ContentBox, so make sure you explore all the options. We strongly recommend using our contentbox-cli to install ContentBox as it is the easiest way to get started.

[Look & Feel + Layouts] Now, Look and Feel are obviously very important. So you have our layouts section. As you can see some of our sections are tied to forgebox [ForgeBox upper right corner].

Again this is administration permission, but you can actually talk into ForgeBox [click ForgeBox] so you can connect to ForgeBox. It will bring you all the different setups available that you can install immediately. If you download a layout, for example, you can then go to your Manage Layouts.

[click manage layouts / left side panel] and you can see that the new layout will be there. If you want to set it as your current layout you can go ahead and activate it [click Activate for the layout]. You can go to your site and check your new layout. So very easy [back to admin \/ active layout] you can now start skinning or downloading themes.

If you are building themes just please remember to contribute to ForgeBox so everybody can benefit.

[Manage Layouts] Management is for you to be able to see which layouts you have. Activate them, upload them, if you need to upload a new theme [Upload layout / up right], rebuild the internal registry, or do any kind of clean up.

Template Folder File Structure

• templates (The folder that contains optional templates for collection rendering that are used using the quick rendering methods in the CB Helper. See below for additional information)

  • category.cfm (The template used to display an iteration of entry categories using coldbox collection rendering)

  • comment.cfm (The template used to display an iteration of entry or page comments using coldbox collection rendering)

  • entry.cfm (The template used to display an iteration of entries in the home page using coldbox collection rendering)

Functionality

The individual files included in the templates directory are a single .cfm files used by ContentBox to iterate over a collection (usually entries or categories or comments) and render out all of them in uniformity.

Please refer to ColdBox Collection Rendering for more information.

Each template receives the following variables:

• _counter (A variable created for you that tells you in which record we are currently looping on)

• _items (A variable created for you that tells you how many records exist in the collection)

• {templateName} The name of the object you will use to display: entry, comment, category

Layout Local CallBack Functions:

• onActivation()

• onDelete()

• onDeactivation()

This is found under the System menu in the navigation on the left. Settings is a tabbed page listing 10+ options control panels. This includes all the core settings, but is also open to module developers, to inject their own settings.

ContentBox is upgraded using CommandBox via the CLI. If you are upgrading from minor to minor/patch level, most likely you won't need to follow an upgrade guide. However, if you are upgrading between major versions make sure you visit each of the major versions' upgrade guide first.

Make a full backup

Make sure you backup your database and source, just in case. We recommend running this against a development instance first and then moving on to production instances.

Update Command

When you are ready with your backups, open up a CommandBox shell using box in the root of your project.

This will update ColdBox and ContentBox respectively and any other dependencies listed in your box.json

Run database migrations

Now that the ContentBox source has been upgraded, let's run the database migrations

Once they run, you are ready to roll!

Professional Updating

The ContentBox team can also do the heavy lifting for you as we are a professional open source project. So just contact us and we will update or install any ContentBox instances in a secure and fast way!

Issues Upgrading

If you encounter any issues upgrading, please make sure you contact us via our

Dashboard Customization

When you or your team log into your ContentBox site, you see your ContentBox Dashboard. You can see recent content, recent comments, recent news, some data snapshots… but you can also quickly customize this to help your team communicate. It is as easy as changing a few ContentBox admin settings.

Click on System > Settings and then click on Admin Options.

You can change the Title / Welcome that shows up on the dashboard.

You can update the Dashboard message, so when everyone logs in, they're reminded of some of your rules, regulations, or maybe a holiday message. As seen above:

One of the nice touches I think, is you can update the NEWS RSS feed. This allows you to add some humor to your day, by adding something like Dilbert's RSS feed… or maybe you can use an aggregator to follow what is happening in the CFML world, or maybe some blogs which you need to read and then update your audience.

Number of Records in Dashboard

You can set the number of items to show up in your dashboard, by type. Set the number for each of the following:

• News Feed Count

• Recent Entries Count

• Recent Pages Count

• Recent Content Store Count

These default to 10 when first installing ContentBox

Paging Options

You also have control of your Website paging, on the front end, for blog posts, as well as content in the back end of your website.

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.

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 been completely re-designed for a 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.

Widgets are small pieces of software that you can add to your ContentBox website to perform a specific function. There are several Widgets built into ContentBox that are used for various parts of your website, and you can insert widgets into blog posts and pages to make your website even more dynamic.

Widgets are one of the ways ContentBox is extendable, you can install modules and themes that overwrite existing widgets, or are brand new... or you can create or customize your own widgets.

Widgets are maintained through the Administrator under Look & Feel > Widgets. You can managing existing widgets, upload new widgets, or download widgets from Forgebox.

In this section of the documentation, you will learn how to use Install, Manage and Use Widgets To learn how you can develop your own widgets, read this section under Developing for ContentBox

Blogging capabilities are an essential component for any website and web application. Blog entries help provide more context around products, services. It inherently creates more online presence and, if managed properly, better search engine 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

Site Options

Mail Server: This is the web address for the SMTP server. The address for the SMTP server may be an Internet address, such as mail.company.com, or the IP address of the mail server, such as 127.0.0.1. If not specified, ContentBox will use the mail server address from the ColdFusion Administrator.

Mail Server Username: This is the username for the mail server, if necessary.

If not specified, ContentBox will use the username address from the ColdFusion Administrator.

Mail Server Password: This is the password for the mail server, if necessary.

If not specified, ContentBox will use the password from the ColdFusion Administrator.

Mail SMTP Port: This is the port number on which the mail server is running. This value will default to 25.

Use TLS: This enables/disables (default) the Transport Level Security (TLS) on the connection to the mail server.

Use SSL: This enables/disables (default) SSL encryption on the connection to the mail server.

After you have configured the mail server settings, you can click the Test Connection button to send a test email message to the email address associated with the current logged in user.

When running ContentBox in Development Mode:

When running ContentBox in development mode, the mail server details are not utilized. Instead, all emails will be written to the file system logs for review. This prevents inadvertent emails from being sent during development.

The logs for every email sent will be located in:

[ContentBox Root Folder]\config\logs\mail

In developing your user interface, the majority of your time will be spent creating content in the admin and modifying files from within your custom theme, located in the [ContentBox Module Home]/themes directory.

With state-of-the art development tools like CommandBox to assist with scaffolding and dependency management and Coldbox Elixr, it's easy to build out your theme in a fraction of the time it might otherwise take.

Theme Directory Conventions

A typical theme directory structure might be:

MyAwesomeTheme

- includes

• css

• fonts

• js

- layouts

- templates

- views

- widgets

For more information on the theme directory structure and configuration options see .

Modularity

In addition, many front-end focused modules and libraries are available on Forgebox and can be installed from the CLI and used immediately in your templates, widgets and views. For example, to install a Twitter feed widget for ContentBox, simply run box install ID=cbwidget-tweetfeed directory=widgets from your theme directory and it will automatically be available for use in the admin. You may browse the ever-growing list of Forgebox libraries and modules on or run forgebox help from within CommandBox to begin exploring the available options.

In this release, we're thrilled to unveil a series of significant enhancements and upgrades to ContentBox designed to elevate your experience and considerably improve system performance. Our team has focused on integrating the latest CommandBox migrations and ColdBox Core, which ensures that the core system continues to operate with maximum efficiency and stability. This upgrade is part of our ongoing commitment to maintaining a cutting-edge platform that meets the evolving needs of our users.

It is also now ready for new engines like BoxLang and Adobe 2025. Lucee 6 support is still not there yet due to several Lucee regressions we are trying to pinpoint and report.

These updates reflect our dedication to delivering a robust, reliable, secure content management system supporting your business goals and growth. We invite you to explore these new features and improvements as part of our continuous effort to bring you the best in content management solutions.

Installation Guide

The source code for this book is hosted in GitHub: . You can freely contribute to it and submit pull requests. The contents of this book are copyright by and cannot be altered or reproduced without the author's consent. All content is provided "As-Is" and can be freely distributed.

• The majority of code examples in this book are done in cfscript.

• The majority of code generation and running of examples are done via CommandBox: The ColdFusion (CFML) CLI, Package Manager, REPL -

Importing from a *.cbox file

Once you have exported the content, you will have a *.cbox file. To import the file, in the admin, click on Tools > Import.

To import your cbox file, select Import ContentBox Package and then select the file by browsing your computer, and click Start Import.

Lets add a widget into a page. In this example, we're going to insert a simple ContentBoxBadge Widget which has no parameters or arguments. We show you how to create this Widget in the Developing for ContentBox section of the documentation.

Lets browse in the admin to Content > Sitemap and click on a page. Find the location in the text you would like to add your widget, and click the Green ContentBox Widget icon ( circled below ).

Pick a Widget out of the list, you can filter the widgets, or select by category ( categories are defined in the Widget properties ).

Click anywhere on the Widget itself, and the Insert Widget Dialog will open like the screen below.

Luis Fernando Majano Lainez

Luis Majano is a Computer Engineer, and published author that has been creating software since the year 2000. He was born in in the late 70s, during a period of economical instability and civil war. He lived in El Salvador until 1995 and then moved to Miami, Florida where he studied and completed his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering at .

He is the founder and CEO of , a consulting firm specializing in web development, ColdFusion (CFML), Java development, and all open-source professional services under the ColdBox, CommandBox, and ContentBox stack. He is the creator of ColdBox, ContentBox, WireBox, TestBox, LogBox, and anything “BOX”, and contributes to over 250 open-source projects. He has a passion for learning and mentoring developers so they can succeed with sustainable software practices and the usage and development of open-source software. You can read his blog at

A theme is composed of the following pieces

ThemeDirectory

• Theme.cfc (The CFC that models and configures your theme implementation)

• layouts (The folder that contains layouts in your theme)

You can declare settings for your Themes that ContentBox will manage for you. The form itself is built from the Theme.cfc file itself.

The value is an array of structures with the following keys:

• name : The name of the setting (required), the setting is saved as cb_layoutname_settingName

• defaultValue : The default value of the setting (required)

Two Factor Authentication

In this settings pane, you can control global settings related to two-factor authentication.

Creating a News Page

[Pages view] Create a New Page [Create Page] and name it “News Page” [title]. Inside the CKEditor [ckeditor window] type: “Welcome to my news!” and give it a heading [heading 2].

Click Create a New Widget and type “RSS” in the Quick Filter. Select the RSS Widget. You will see that it gives you an error because you need to fill out the required info for the widget. To do this, get the RSS link for your favorite news site and paste it in the feed URL field. If your link is valid, you should see a list of links display in the Widget Preview area.

Before clicking Insert Widget there are a few things you can modify. For example, maxItems allows you to select very easily how many items you want to be displayed. You can also use showBody

By default the includes directory of your theme is used to store your static assets.

Because these assets are called from your customized theme, however, you may use any directory conventions you prefer. If you plan to use customized paths or CDN links in your template, it's best to create a setting in your Theme.cfc which will then be configured through the admin.

AddAsset() Method for CSS and JS

In the Front End of the Website, the Theme takes over the rendering. To ensure all Assets are added correctly from various modules, for every theme, we recommend using the htmlHelper's

Bug

CONTENTBOX-1505 RenderView widget exception when using `view()` to render the view

CONTENTBOX-1506 Updated all server.jsons to use `env` for the ortus orm extension since the latest lucee build broken extensions via jvm args

CONTENTBOX-1507 BulkSave not accounting for sites when filtering and saving

ContentBox itself is a ColdBox application, with 3 special modules that do all of the hard work. Below you will see the shell of the ColdBox app, with the key folders expanded and bolded.

Although ContentBox has a large number of folders and files, most customization activities will be done in a few key locations. This should make navigating the ContentBox source files easier.

We recommend using modules for extending ContentBox. Modules are easy to install, and can be managed through the ContentBox admin, activating and deactivating as needed. Modules can contain widgets, interceptors, admin or front end menu items, including handlers and views.

Themes are self contained folders, within ContentBox's themes folder. Themes themselves are module like, with a few added features, which means you can include modules in your themes for truly deep and powerful themes.

Traditional ColdBox Modules can be installed outside of ContentBox's control and life-cycle with ColdBox's normal conventions.

Initial ContentBox Website Install

• coldbox ( The ColdBox core, including system and ColdBox dependencies )

• config ( The ColdBox app config folder )

• handlers ( The ColdBox app handlers folder )

• layouts ( The ColdBox app layouts folder )

• models ( The ColdBox app layouts folder )

• modules ( The ColdBox app layouts folder )

  • contentbox

    • content ( default location for the media manager - customizable through Admin settings )

• modules_app ( Home for all of your custom ColdBox modules, outside of ContentBox's lifecycle )

• views ( The ColdBox app layouts folder )

• .htaccess

• Application.cfc ( The main ColdBox Application.cfc )

• box.json

• favicon.ico

• index.cfm

• license.txt

• readme.md

• robots.txt

• server.json

In System > Settings > Security Options - You will see 3 new features to ContentBox ( released in ContentBox 3.0 ), the Login Tracker, the Rate Limiter, and Secure Sockets Layer ( SSL ) Encryption.

Login Tracker and Lockout

The ContentBox administrator module now comes with a login tracker which if enabled can track invalid logins and be able to block individual ip addresses from brute-force attempts. We even track all valid logins into the new ContentBox Security Audit Log.

Rate Limiter

One of the biggest problems on the internet today, is out and out traffic overload. Of course, hardened hardware is the best approach to stop denial of service attacks, but we have given you some tools inside of ContentBox to help at the software level. You can now run your very own Rate Limiter.

SSL Support

SSL support can now be found everywhere in ContentBox for both the UI and admin modules. Users can even select specific pages for users to transition into or out of SSL for richer eCommerce or secure experiences.

Other Security Information

Security is a big issue with any website these days, and with the number of WordPress hacks in the wild, it’s a big PRO to using ContentBox. With Brute force attacks to admins so prominent, we have a few features to make your life easier, and your website safer.

Bcrypt Support

One of the major upgrades in ContentBox 3.0, ContentBox now offers BCrypt support for password encryption, to make cracking passwords harder than ever. The default algorithm for passwords is now based on BCrypt with work factors for better security and entropy. You can read more on bcrypt here:

Password Policy

A new password policy is now in place for ContentBox for new and current users, which must be greater than 8 characters with at least one:

• Lower case character

• Upper case character

• Digit

• Special character

Adminless ContentBox Site

All of these features are definitely great addons to ContentBox, but one of the best features of all...you can completely remove the Admin itself from your production site. This would give hackers no access to the login page at all.

Secure your site today.

Working with Assets in the Admin

To make Asset management easier in the Admin, we have provided a few arrays, that you can append your assets to. We have JS and CSS arrays, as well as convention based, and full path arrays.

Javascript Assets

We have two options for working with Javascript in the admin.

jsAppendList

This expects the name of the js file ( without the .js extension ) which is located in the ContentBox includes/js folder. This is a simple convention based approach, so you can easily just append a file, for example arrayAppend( jsAppendList, 'dragula' ) to load /includes/js/dragula.js

jsFullAppendList

This expects the full path of the js file ( including the .js extension ), including the location. This is useful, because you may be using grunt or gulp to compile files, store them in different locations, or actually link out to a CDN for some of your scripts.

For example:

• arrayAppend( jsFullAppendList, '/includes/js/dragula.js' );

• arrayAppend( jsFullAppendList, 'https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.1.1.min.js' );

How the JS is output

Inside of /modules/contentbox-admin/layouts/inc/HTMLBodyEnd.cfm you will see the following code.

CSS Assets

We have two options for working with CSS in the admin.

cssAppendList

This expects the name of the CSS file ( without the .css extension ) which is located in the ContentBox includes/css folder. This is a simple convention based approach, so you can easily just append a file, for example arrayAppend( cssAppendList, 'dragula' ) to load /includes/css/dragula.css

cssFullAppendList

This expects the full path of the css file ( including the .css extension ), including the location. This is useful, because you may be using grunt or gulp to compile files, store them in different locations, or actually link out to a CDN for some of your scripts.

For example:

• arrayAppend( cssFullAppendList, '/includes/css/dragula.css' );

• arrayAppend( cssFullAppendList, 'https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/css/bootstrap.min.css' );

How the CSS is output

Inside of /modules/contentbox-admin/layouts/inc/HTMLHead.cfm you will see the following code.

Whether you have a website with a lot of traffic, or not, it pays to have a test / staging site setup to test out changes to your website. One of the biggest problems with having a staging and production website, is moving data from one environment into another. This need inspired the Content Import and Export features in ContentBox.

The Import and Export tools are located in the Admin menu under Tools.

From this panel you can choose to export your entire site or parts of it as a *.box archive package.

You have 2 options, Export everything, and Mr Picky, where you can pick and choose.

As you can see in the pick and choose, there are lots of options. Pages, Entries, Categories, ContentStore, Authors, Roles, Permissions, Security Rules, Settings and much more. This makes it easy to pick and choose the content you need to move.

When you are ready, you can click Export Preview to see exactly what will be exported ( see below ).

Once you are happy with your selection, click Start Export

Once complete, you will be prompted to save your cbox file.

Once you have exported your content into a cbox file, you can import it to the installation of your choice, through Tools > Import

is a ColdFusion (CFML) Command Line Interface (CLI), REPL, Package Manager and Embedded Server. We will leverage the CLI in CommandBox to install, deploy and configure ContentBox.

Requirements

• MacOS, Windows, or Linux

When installing a CMS, one of the first steps you would normally take, is install a theme. We wanted to give you a head-start and give you a theme that gives you plenty of options to customize your site, colors, social media icons, and even a hero style homepage. In ContentBox 3.1 we even updated Themes to have better documentation, so it's easier to get started with your theme. Let's see what the default theme can do for you.

Theme Settings

Theme settings is where all of your configuration happens. In ContentBox 3 we added a lot of functionality to make the Theme Settings easier to work with, for Devs and Users. The first you will see if the groupings of settings. This allows a User to focus on one set of settings at a time. With a complex theme, having all of the settings visible at once can be very overwhelming.

The roles menu is located under the User menu in the navigation bar to the left of the screen.

In this menu you will see a list of roles available to assign users, which will allow you to define their access to the site. You can use the quick search function if you are looking for specific roles, otherwise you can look in the main body of the page.

You will see 5 headings across the page

• Role - This will be the name given to the role

Content categories can be edited in the administrator, located under the left hand menu 'Content'.

Each post ( Page or Blog ) can be filed under zero, one or many categories. Categorization helps group content and gives users more options for navigating your content.

Links to your categories of blog posts show up in the right hand menu of your blog layout (theme implementation may vary), and show up as 'Tags' for your blog entry.

The category manager is simple, including a simple search, listing Categories with their associated slug, and a list of pages and entries currently associated with this category, and options to 'Edit' or 'Delete'.

You can perform Bulk actions using the checkboxs next to Category Name, and clicking 'Bulk Action', which allows you to perform one of the following tasks:

• Delete Selected

On this menu you will have the following options to change:

Site Options

Site Name: This is the global name of this ContentBox website. This is the name that will display in the browser and what will normally show up in search engines. In the default Theme, this is the Header for the site ( unless you select a logo image ).

Site Tag Line: This is a slogan, motto, your USP Unique Selling Proposition, or short catchy 10 second elevator pitch. This is commonly used as a Alt tag for Logos by themes, each theme varies.

Hola amigo! I'm excited that you are interested in contributing to ContentBox CMS. Before submitting your contribution, please make sure to take a moment and read through the following guidelines:

Code Of Conduct

This project is open source, and as such, the maintainers give their free time to build and maintain the source code held within. They make the code freely available, hoping it will be useful to other developers and/or businesses. Please be considerate towards maintainers when raising issues or presenting pull requests. We all follow the Golden Rule: Do to others as you want them to do to you.

• As contributors and maintainers of this project, we pledge to respect all people who contribute through reporting issues, posting feature requests, updating documentation, submitting pull requests or patches, and other activities.

• Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.

• Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include the use of sexual language or imagery, derogatory comments or personal attacks, trolling, public or private harassment, insults, or other unprofessional conduct.

• Project maintainers are responsible for removing, editing, or rejecting comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions not aligned with this Code of Conduct. Project maintainers who do not follow the Code of Conduct may be removed from the project team.

• When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions. Emotions cannot be derived from textual representations.

• Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by opening an issue or contacting one or more project maintainers.

Bug Reporting

Please make sure also that if you submit a pull request, you link it to the appropriate issue.

• ContentBox :

• ColdBox Core :

If you file a bug report, your issue should contain a title, a clear description of the issue, a way to replicate the issue, and any support files that we might need to replicate your issue. The goal of a bug report is to make it easy for yourself - and others - to replicate the bug and develop a fix for it. All issues that do not contain a way to replicate will not be addressed.

Support Questions

If you have any questions on usage, professional support or just ideas to bounche of the maintainers, please do not create an issue. Leverage our support channels first.

• Ortus Community Discourse:

• Box Slack Team:

• Professional Support:

Pull Request Guidelines

• The master branch is just a snapshot of the latest stable release. All development should be done in dedicated branches. Do not submit PRs against the master branch. They will be closed.

• All pull requests should be sent against the development branch or the release branch for LTS

• Having multiple small commits as you work on the PR is OK - GitHub will automatically squash it before merging.

Security Vulnerabilities

If you discover a security vulnerability, please email the development team at and report it to the #security channel in our Box Team Slack Channel. All security vulnerabilities will be promptly addressed.

Development Setup

We have added all the necessary information for you to develop on ContentBox in our readme collaboration area and our UI Developer Docs so you can setup for UI development.

Language Compatibility

Please make sure your code runs on the following CFML Engines:

• Lucee 5+

• Adobe ColdFusion 2018+

Coding Styles & Formatting

We are big on coding styles and have included a .cfformat.json in the root of the project so that you can run the formatting tools and CommandBox scripts:

We recommend that anytime you hack on the core, you start the formatter watcher (box run-script format:watch). This will monitor your changes and auto-format your code for you.

You can also see the Ortus Coding Standards you must follow here:

CFC Docs With DocBox

All CFCs are self-documenting, and we leverage to document the entire software. All functions must be properly documented using the DocBox syntax:

Financial Contributions

You can support ColdBox and all of our Open Source initiatives at Ortus Solutions by becoming a Patreon. You can also get lots of goodies and services depending on the level of contributions.

Contributors

Thank you to all the people who have already contributed to ContentBox! We ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ love you!

Made with

UDF ( User Defined Functions ) are a great way to add more power to your theme, and your theme settings.

Below are some common UDFs you might want to use in your themes, or templates on how you could create some of your own.

Example UDFs

LoadHelpFile()

This is a useful method for standardizing loads HTML for the fieldHelp Modal. The fieldHelp setting using this function would look like this

loadHelpFile( 'cbBootswatchTheme.html' );

Since the helpFilePath is not passed in this example, it defaults to the Theme's includes/help/ folder.

Note: One concern when using this is relative pathing of assets, since the modal is generated in one folder, and the includes are in another folder.

selectMediaManagerFolder()

This function gives you an array of Media Manager folders, so you could use in a optionsUDF setting, to allow the Theme Settings form to display a dropdown box with a list of folders. This would be great for a slide show, where the users select the folder, and all of the contents of the folder could be shown in the slideshow.

getBootstrapStyles()

Bootstrap has a set of pre-defined styles, used in alerts, buttons, and many other styles you can use in your website. Having a UDF like this, allows you to create a setting that the User can select the button style type.

getBootstrapSwatches()

We use BootSwatch in several Themes, because it gives the user of the theme a lot of complete styles, in one theme. This UDF shows you how you can return a list as an array, so a user could select the BootSwatch they would like to use.

ContentBox v6.x is a major version update and will require the following instructions to update your v5.x installations. Please follow this guide or contact us at [email protected] so we can assist you during your upgrade process.

1. Requirements

All Upgrades to ContentBox should be done with the assistance of So ensure you have CommandBox installed on the server/machine you will be upgrading.

Upgrade System Dependencies

Once you have CommandBox installed, let's make sure we have some global dependencies installed so CommandBox can work with ContentBox automated upgrades:

This will install the module and the module that will be used to provide upgrades in the future. This is only done once. ContentBox 5 already ships with these dependencies once you install it.

2. Backups

Please make sure you backup your source code and your database. We are not liable for broken installations.

3. MySQL UTF8mb4

If you are using MySQL you will need to make sure your database and your tables are all using the following character set: utf8mb4 and NOT just utf8. ContentBox 5 requires the charset to be utf8mb4.

We also suggest you use the utf8mb4_general_ci collation for your database, tables and columns as well.

4. Run the Updater

We have prepared a CommandBox task to upgrade your installation in one easy execution. This will upgrade your files and run the database migrations for you.

*nix/Mac

If you are in a Linux or Mac environment, you can execute the task using the following shell commands from the root directory of your application.

Windows

If you are in Windows, download the following task:

and place it at the root of your project. Then, issue the following CommandBox shell command to execute it.

5. Final Steps

The updater will update your installation and run the migration scripts. However, it will also override the following files:

It will create .bak files for the originals so you can manually merge in any changes you had before.

Once you do, go ahead and start up the engines! You are upgraded!

Optional Steps

If you have developed themes, modules, models, or any type of extension based on ContentBox 5, you will most likely have to update your code to match the new interfaces, methods, and approaches. Especially since ContentBox 6 runs on ColdBox 7.

In this section, you will deploy ContentBox to run on any Adobe or Lucee CFML engine. The first step is to use CommandBox and our contentbox-cli package to install and configure ContentBox for usage in any CFML Engine.

Media Manager

The Media manager is a WEB UI to be able to interact with your Media. You can access the Media Manager from the Admin Menu under Content, in addition to buttons within different Content Editors.

The Media Manager has many options, but by default will look like the image below.

Global Variables and Functions

During the ContentBox request, common variables and super-type methods are made available to all templates and views used in that request. When developing themes and modules for ContentBox, the following methods and variables are available for use in customization:

Improvement

CONTENTBOX-1513 Updating to ortus orm extension latest

Bug

CONTENTBOX-1510 Use of encodeForHTML on email in Comment Form breaks Comment functionality

ContentBox sports its very own ContentBox Docker image. As with the CommandBox image, the [major].[minor].[patch] versioning mirrors the upstream product version, so it's easy to pull deploy a specific version, should your application require it.

Playing around

The image is packaged with a self-contained express version, which uses an in-memory H2 database. To stand up an image using an un-configured express edition, simply run:

A new container will be spun up from the image and, upon opening your browser to http://[docker machine ip]:8080, you will be directed to configure your installation using the ContentBox Installer. That easy! Boom!

CommandBox Image Features

The ContentBox image is based on the so all features and environment variables are applicable. Please refer to that documentation as well:

Persisting Data Between Restarts

The above run command produces an image which is self-contained, and would be destroyed when the container is stopped. If we wanted to run a version in production, we would need to persist, at the very minimum, the database and your custom assets (widgets, modules, themes, and media library). In order to do this, we need to mount those resources into the Docker host file system.

By convention, the express H2 database is stored at /data/contentbox/db inside the container. In addition, the custom content module which contains your custom themes, widgets, modules, and media library are stored under /app/modules_app/contentbox-custom.

Mountable Points

Let's mount both of those volume points so that our database and user assets persists between restarts:

Now, once our image is up, we can walk through the initial configuration. Once the configuration is complete, simply stop the container and then start it without the environment variable INSTALL in place. The H2 database and uploads will be persisted and the installer will be removed automatically on container start.

INSTALL Setting Caveats

Please remember that the INSTALL environment variable is ONLY used to go through the ContentBox installer wizard. Once the database is seeded with the installation process, you will no longer use it unless you want to reconfigure the installation.

Custom Database Configuration

If you would like to connect your container to an external database system, you can very easily do so, which would allow us to connect from multiple containers in a distributed fashion (MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL, etc). If not, you run the risk of file locks if multiple container replicas are sharing the same H2 database.

The image is configured to allow all ORM-supported JDBC drivers to be configured by specifying the environment variables to connect. Alternately, you may specify a environment variable which points to a file containing your engine configuration, including data sources.

To programmatically configure the database on container start, environment variables that represent your datasource configuration should be provided. There are two patterns supported:

1. DB_DRIVER configuration - which may be used for Adobe Coldfusion servers

2. DB_CLASS configuration - which configures a datasource by JDBC driver and connection string (Both Adobe and Lucee)

An example container run command, configuring a MySQL database would be executed like so:

To use the DB_DRIVER syntax for Adobe Coldfusion, an example run command would be:

As you can see, these commands can become quite long. As such, using or may provide a more manageable alternative.

Granular Environmental Control

A number of environment variables, specific to the ContentBox image, are available for use. They include:

• EXPRESS=true - Uses an H2, in-memory database. Useful for very small sites or for testing the image. See

• INSTALL=true (alias: INSTALLER) - Adds the installer module at runtime, to assist in configuring your installation. You would omit this from your run command, once your database has been configured

• BE=true

In addition, the environment variables are also available to use in your container. For additional information on using the CommandBox docker image, see .

Automatic Session Distribution

By default, the ContentBox image will use the Lucee Open Source CFML engine for running the application. It will also configure the datasource to store user sessions so you can easily scale the image or send it to Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, etc for scalability.

You can also use the SESSION_STORAGE environment variable to switch the connection to any backend you like.

Distributed Caching

By default, our image configures a jdbc CacheBox cache region that will be used to distribute settings, sessions, flash data, content, RSS feeds, sitemaps, etc. This means that out-of-the-box, your ContentBox containers can use the database to distribute its content within a swarm or set of services. However, if you would like to use your own CacheBox providers or a more sophisticated distributed cache like Redis or Couchbase, you can.

We have also prepared a docker-compose and distribution example using Redis (more caches to come) and the ContentBox image. This example will allow you to have a stack that can easily distribute your sessions and content via Redis. You can find the repository here:

Healthchecks

The image contains built-in capabilities for health checks for the running application. You can customize the URL entry point by using the HEALTHCHECK_URI environment variable. By default, this is set http://127.0.0.1:${PORT}/ at 30s intervals with 5 retries and a timeout of 60s.

In Short

The ContentBox image for Docker re-vamps the entire Modular CMS game by de-coupling your customizations and user assets from the underlying framework. It can make your source code lighter-weight, as well as providing you with a standardized development environment, which matches your production container strategy.

To create or edit administrative users for ContentBox, select the User menu in the navigation bar on the left. The menu will drop down and you will need to select Manage.

User Management List

Once in the User Management screen you will be presented with existing users, email addresses, roles and the last time a user logged in.

There is also a icon that will allow you to select user actions such as:

• Edit User

• Delete the user

• Export the information for a user as JSON or XML to import to another site. This is a simple way to give users access to additional websites.

You will also see a star next to the user you are currently logged in as.

Above the users there is a bulk actions button. This allows you to import JSON or XML files or export all users as JSON or XML.

Filtering Users

When managing large number of users, this screen might become overwhelming. On the right hand side you will have an option to help filter the users. You can filter by status or roles or a combination of both.

Creating a user.

Click on create user in the top right corner of the User management box. On this screen you will see the user details. Fill out the details with * as these are required.

You will then need to choose if the user is active and what role you will assign to the user. (please see roles for further information)

Below here you have the option to enter a Biography or Notes About The User. This is not required.

Once this has all been completed, click save details at the bottom of the page.

Password Security

The password has requirements to make sure that they are secure.

It requires the following:

• 8 Characters long

• 1 Capital letter

• 1 Number

• 1 Special Character (such as @#$%)

Edit a User

On the User Management page click on the User Action icon at the end of the user.

This will open up the editing page.

This looks a lot like the create user screen, however you will notice on the left hand side, there are Tabs, with categories of more information to save about a user.

Details

The Details menu allows you the same information as creating a new user apart from the password. You are not able to change the password in this area.

Password

Changing Password allows you to change your own password or reset the password for another user (given you have the correct permissions).

You can email a password reset to any user that is not the currently logged in user.

Two Factor Authentication

A user can enroll themselves in two factor authentication. The manage screen allows the user to configure any required information before starting the enrollment process.

To enroll, a user must successfully enter in the code or credentials sent via the default provider. On a successful entry, the user will be enrolled in two factor authentication.

Users are able to unenroll from two-factor authentication themselves from the manage screen. Users with an admin role assigned are able to unenroll not only themselves but other users as well.

Force Two Factor Authentication

If two factor authentication is being enforced, users will be forced to enroll in two factor authentication. if a user unenrolls from two-factor authentication a form to enroll in two-factor will be presented right away.

When a not enrolled user is logging in and the two-factor authentication is being enforced, the enrollment form will be presented and the user won't be able to see the dashboard or any other content unless a successful enrollment in two-factor authentication is performed.

Preferences

The next menu is Preferences. In this menu you will notice there are areas for social media profiles and settings such as collapsed left nav bar enabling the user to setup contentbox the way they prefer.

Permissions

The next menu is Permissions. In this area it enables you to see what permissions this user has (please see permissions for more information).

Role Permissions Role permissions are assigned to the user when creating the user by assigning the role. Each role has a default set of permissions allocated to it. If the user requires an additional role you can use the A-la-Carte Permission area below.

A-la-Carte Permissions In this section you can Assign A-la-Carte Permissions. This means that if someone doesn’t have access to a permission from their standard permission profile but needs access to it, you can give access to just that selection without enabling the user more access than needed.

Latest Edits

The next Menu is Latest Edits. This will show you anything this user has edited. This will show you the title, date/time, whether it was published, and lets you view the change on the site by clicking the action button.

Latest Drafts

The last menu option is Latest Drafts. This will show you what work has been saved but not yet published. Again it will show you title, date/time and lets you edit the draft directly from this menu.

ContentBox's modular architecture, combined with the awesome power of the ColdBox MVC development framework, allows for a familiar, yet unrestricted, platform from which to develop great web applications.

If you're a Front End Developer, you'll appreciate the straightforward configuration and pre-defined ( but highly customizable! ) asset conventions.

Within the ColdBox framework, itself ContentBox is comprised of three modules:

• contentbox - Includes the the underlying libraries for content organization and presentation

• contentbox-admin - Provides the administrative interface for managing your CMS

• contentbox-ui - Provides shared libraries for the user interface which are used for presentation and which may be extended to your application requirements.

Browse through our area-specific development documentation to get started:

The menu manager allows you to create 'Menus' to be used in a variety of ways in your ContentBox Website. A Menu can contains several Items, which can be from a range of Item types, Content like Pages and Blog posts, Media, Submenus, URLs, JS or Free type. Menus are easy to create, and give you a lot more options that relying on pages inside your traditional Sitemap structure.

By default, ContentBox sites use the Sitemap to generate a menu for display. To use a Menu instead of the Sitemap, you have to install a Theme which supports Menus, and then select the Menu you wish to use as you main site Menu.

Some Themes may support additional menus for top menus, footer menus, side bar menus. Please refer to your Theme.

Menu Data

• Title: The name of the Menu

• List Type: ( ul | ol ) Unordered List or Ordered List

• Menu Slug: This is the code referenced slug, to be used to retrieve the Menu in the Theme or View, where required.

• CSS Classes: Optional CSS Classes to be added to the Main Menu List itself ( ul or ol - when supported by the Theme )

Item Types

• Content

• Media

• Submenu

• URL

Each content type has it's own set of attributes.

Common Attributes (Shared by all Item Types)

• Label - Read Only - Same as the Item Content field below.

• Item Content - This is Name/Title that shows in the Menu Item itself.

• CSS Classes - Optional additional CSS classes to be added to the list item

Type: Content

Content refers to a Page, or Blog Entry. You can search and select the content item you wish this item to link to. The Item Content ( visible label for the menu item ) automatically populates when you select an item for Content Item.

In Addition to the Common Attributes listed above, this type also includes:

• Content - This is a search and selection tool to help you select a page or blog entry for this Menu Item to link to.

• URL Classes - Additional CSS for this Menu Item's HTML Element

• Target - Allows you to select how the link is treated by the browser, allowing

Type: Media

Refers to Media from the Media Manager

In Addition to the Common Attributes listed above, this type also includes:

• Media - This is a search and selection tool to help you select a media item from the Media Manager for this Menu Item to link to.

• URL Classes - Additional CSS for this Menu Item's HTML Element

• Target - Allows you to select how the link is treated by the browser, allowing

Type: Submenu

A Submenu type allows you to select an entire Menu to be included in the current Menu, as a Menu Item.

In Addition to the Common Attributes listed above, this type also includes:

• Select Sub-menu - This is a drop down select list of all of the Menus available for selection.

• Data Attributes - Allows you to add one or many data attributes for the menu item. You can use JSON ( {"me":"you"} ) or a comma-delimited list ( me=you,icecream=awesome )

• Title - An accessible title, commonly used by browsers as a tool tip.

Note: This relies on the Theme you are using, to utilize this feature.

Type: URL

A URL allows you to add any linkable URL you might desire into your Menu.

In Addition to the Common Attributes listed above, this type also includes:

• URL - The URL you wish to use for this menu item

• URL Classes - Additional CSS for this Menu Item's HTML Element

• Target - Allows you to select how the link is treated by the browser, allowing

Type: JS

Not all menu items will be Links to other HTTP resources, with todays applications, we are commonly using more and more JavaScript, and the Menu Manager allows you to add JavaScript into your Menu Items as well.

In Addition to the Common Attributes listed above, this type also includes:

• JavaScript Code - JavaScript to be excuted when this Menu Item is clicked.

• URL Classes - Additional CSS for this Menu Item's HTML Element

• Data Attributes - Allows you to add one or many data attributes for the menu item. You can use JSON ( {"me":"you"} ) or a comma-delimited list ( me=you,icecream=awesome )

• Title - An accessible title, commonly used by browsers as a tool tip.

Type: Free

This is a menu item that creates a 'free-text' menu item. This item only uses the common attributes, Item Content, and CSS Classes... listed above.

Preview

As you add, edit, and delete Menu Items, you can preview those menu items in page. You can refresh the menu by clicking the refresh icon next to the title Preview if the preview has not updated as expected.

Let's start with system requirements for running ContentBox sites on all deployable options.

Java

You need Java 11+ to run ContentBox.

CommandBox

You will need to have CommandBox for installation, upgrading, and optionally running your ContentBox sites. Please see our section.

ColdFusion (CFML) Engine

ContentBox can be deployed to the following CFML Engines:

• Adobe ColdFusion

  • 2016 (End of life is December 2021)

  • 2018 (Deprecated)

Databases

Here are the supported databases for ContentBox:

• MySQL 5.7 (InnoDB ONLY!)

• MySQL 8+ (InnoDB ONLY!)

• Microsoft SQL Server 2012+

• HypersonicSQL

If you have another database engine needing ContentBox support, please let us know, and we can help you ().

Microsoft SQL Caveats

We have seen an issue where an error will be reported that cbPermission cannot be inserted. This is an issue where the JDBC driver will switch context and create the tables in the master schema and not the schema you chose. So please verify that the master schema has tables that start with cb_* and remove them and re-run the installer.

URL Rewriting

ContentBox relies on Search Engine Safe (SES) URLs and URL Routing. Most CFML engines already allow for these URLs out of the box, and ContentBox supports them out of the box. However, if you would like to use full URL rewriting (which we recommend, that's where the index.cfm is not showing in the URLs) you will need to use a web server rewriting tool, and ContentBox will configure it for you.

So before you install ContentBox, make sure that you are using one of the supported rewriting engines shown below:

• CommandBox Server (Default)

• Apache mod_rewrite

• IIS 7 rewrite module

• Tuckey rewrite filter

The ContentBox installer will create rewrite files automatically for you for Apache, IIS7, and express editions. You must add the rewrites yourself for Nginx or other rewrite engines and then manually modify the routing file.

ContentBox Routing Full Rewrite Support

Edit config/Router.cfc and set setFullRewrites to true. That's it!

File Permissions

ContentBox needs some files/folders to be writable at runtime.

Installer

Engine

Here are the folders for the core engine to work accordingly

This option is under Users in the left side navigation bar. This is a list of all permissions available for the site.

There is a quick search box at the top of the permissions page if you are looking for a specific permission.

On the permissions page you will see 4 headings.

• Permission - This is the name of the permission

• Description - This explains the permission and what access it allows for the user

• Roles Assigned - This shows you how many users are using this permission currently.

• Actions

  • Green Icon - Edit the permission

  • Red Delete Icon - Delete the permission.

Creating Permissions

Click Create Permission to add a permission. A permission consists of:

• Permission ( commonly known as a slug / name )

• Description

A Permission Slug can be referenced from inside of code used in Widgets, Modules, Themes, restricting access however you see fit. Creating a permission allows you to assign the permission to Roles and/or Users, but will not be functional without code referencing the Permission ( slug ).

A Permission ( slug ) can also be referenced from inside the Security Rules as well. Security rules are used to secure ContentBox according to incoming events or URLs, much like a firewall. See that System > Security Rules for more information on how Permissions are used.

Bulk Actions

In the top right section of the page, you will see a Bulk Actions button next to Create Permission. This allows you to do the following:

• Import

• Export All as JSON

• Export All as XML

Import

This is a nice feature when you manage several sites. You can setup permissions on one site, and then export them, and import them into the other sites you manage.

For safety reasons, when you Import Permissions, by default you will not override any content. If you have existing Permissions, that you want to be updated, please set Override Content to true. Otherwise existing content will be skipped during the import process.

Export as JSON / XML

Exporting to JSON or XML is a simple process. Click Bulk Actions and select your format, and in seconds you will see a file download prompt pop up, asking you to open or save your file ( in most browsers ).

If you already have a ColdBox application and wish to install ContentBox, you most definitely can.

System Requirements

Please note that ContentBox requires ColdBox 7.x

Step 1: Dependencies

Since version 3.5.0, you can now issue a command in CommandBox to install the ContentBox module into an existing ColdBox application. Just open a box shell in the root of your ColdBox application and use the following command:

This will install the ContentBox module with all of its dependencies under the /modules/contentbox and the ContentBox installer module under /modules/contentbox-installer.

Lucee ORM Extension

If you are using Lucee, then you need to use the Ortus ORM Extension

Step 2: Application.cfc Updates

Now open your Application.cfc and you will add the following updates:

Mappings

ORM Settings

Step 3: .env Settings

Below are the env settings for ContentBox to run, spice up as needed

Step 4: Module Settings

Here is the collection of the latest module settings for ContentBox. Make sure you copy/merge the settings found here:

Step 5: CacheBox.cfc Settings

Open your CacheBox configuration file: config/CacheBox.cfc and add the following cache declarations:

Once these updates are done, then you can start up the server and visit the installer URL: http://localhost:port/cbInstaller

Step 6 (Optional) : UI Route

By default ContentBox is in take over mode. Meaning that the UI module will intercept all calls made to the application and process them as pages or blog entries. If you DO NOT want this to happen, then you can segregate the UI module into a single entry point URL like blog or site or pages. You can do this by opening the following file: modules/contentbox-ui/ModuleConfig.cfc and looking for the following code:

Now update the this.entryPoint to whatever you like the entry point URL to be. Restart the application and voila!