015 Better ContentBox Themes and Easily Creating an Amazing UI, with Esmeralda Acevedo

Esmeralda Acevedo talks about “Better ContentBox Themes and easily creating an Amazing UI” in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

“I could become more active in the community. But I'm already part of the Box team on Slack and that's how people can reach me. I'm new to this if I can help anybody there, as it is I've had a lot of people helping me when I was building my project.” – Esmeralda Acevedo

Esmeralda is one of the speakers of the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where she will talk about Developing ContentBox Themes.

In her ITB talk, she wants to share what's new in ContentBox 3, and the big updates from Layouts in earlier versions.

Episode highlights

• Amazing Theme UI
• From Layouts to Themes
• Creative Themes
• Headerview, Footerview, styles
• How to change out your Theme
• Better Theme Setting and how they affect the users
• ContentBox Theme Modules and Events
• How climbing mountains helps her code better
• Why are you proud to use CF?
• WWIT to make CF more alive this year?
• What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?
• Esme will be presenting with Gavin Pickin the ContentBox evangelist
• Developing ContentBox Themes

• Themes are new in ContentBox 3, getting big updates from Layouts in earlier versions.
• Components of a Theme – Learn about the different components of a Theme, and how to customize and use them. Layouts, Views, Templates, Widgets & Modules.
• Themes, not Layouts – Themes is our new mantra. We have transitioned layouts to what we now call ContentBox Themes. They have been revamped to support ColdBox 4.
• New Theme.cfc – The theme descriptor CFC is now named Theme.cfc. Backward compatibility still remains, but now the new descriptor will provide a nice way for editors and tools to target.
• Theme Setting Groups + Help – You can now create theme setting groups in the theme descriptor Theme.cfc and the new admin UI will present them in a categorized and ordered format. This is a great way to visualize theme settings. You now have the ability to add notes and help in the form of modals, all built from the Theme.cfc
• Theme Modules – Themes can now include ContentBox modules in a new folder convention called modules. This allows you to ship your theme with 1 or a billion modules.
• New Theme Events – The theme life-cycle now presents several new events: cbadmin_preThemeSettingsSave, cbadmin_postThemeSettingsSave, cbadmin_onThemeSettings, cbadmin_onThemeInfo

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.

What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.

And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.

You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.

All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.

Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.

No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.

√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!

 

Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Mentioned in this episode

• ContentStore custom fields
• Sass compiles CSS – CSS with superpowers
• ForgeBox
• Vue.js

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Speaker details

Esmeralda Acevedo is a Software Consultant for Ortus Solutions, Corp. Her professional journey began about 17 years ago as a graphic/web designer, in the time of tables and frames. After graduating from California State University with a major in Art and a minor in Computer Science, she was hired to work along CFML developers. Although Esmeralda was mainly involved in the design aspect of the projects, she gradually became more involved in assisting the programming team.

Eventually, Esmeralda returned to school to complete a technical degree, with an emphasis on software development. Now, in addition to her experience with graphic design tools, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Indesign, etc., she has added application development tools, which include CFML, MySQL, Javascript, CSS, Bootstrap, Coldfusion, Coldbox, ContentBox to the list.

Away from the computer, she has a love for the outdoors. As John Muir said, “ Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” Besides washing the spirit clean, nature clears her mind to solve programming issues or inspires me to create designs.

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:               Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Esme, also known as Esmeralda Acevedo if … I made a meal out of your name there.

Esmeralda A.:                 That's okay. Acevedo.

Michaela Light:               Acevedo. And she is going to be talking about Content Box themes and she is not only an amazing graphic designer, she's also a Cold Fusion developer and she learned about Sequel and Cold Fusion and Cold Box and Java Script and goodness what else so she could create amazing themes for Content Box. And some of the ones that come bundled with Content Box, she created. We're going to be talking about how she did that and the important thing in Theme UI and how you can create an amazing UI and what difference that makes. We'll look at some of the creative things she's done with themes, not just your regular theme but things that are, a different way of presenting information.

                                            And how you present the settings to the users makes an effect on the usability. Welcome, Esme.

Esmeralda A.:                 Thank you for having me.

Michaela Light:               You started out being a graphic designer and then you started working with all this Content Box and other things at Ortiz and now you've learned a whole bunch of Cold Fusion as well.

Esmeralda A.:                 Yes, yes. Actually, my first experience with Cold Box and Content Box, it was my senior project for school and I had to crash course it because I didn't really know anything much about it and that's how I became introduced with it. I read so much documentation thank goodness Luis had posted up there and from that I developed my senior project and within a week I had it going. And this is somebody that didn't know anything about it. So yeah, that's great and I think that little I had of Cold Fusion knowledge, it helped me understand what was going on.

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