Seth Engen talks about “Adventures with ColdFusion and ContentBox in the Wild” in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.
Seth is one of the speakers of the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about ContentBox In The Wild.
In his ITB talk, Seth will mention a variety of specific real-world scenarios where ContentBox has answered business needs.
“We're dealing with in theming essentially HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is the one area where it's probably most like other content management systems but with ContentBox I think there's a real power.” – Seth Engen
Episode highlights
- What the heck is ContentBox?
- How is it different from other open source ColdFusion CMSs?
- Built On top of ColdBox framework
- Security good
- Scalable
- Great support from Ortus
- Why use ContentBox Themes and what are the amazing things that you can you do with them?
- How ContentBox widgets make it easy to program common business needs
- A CFC with a UI that you can drag and drop in the content page
- Some data and properties are exposed in the UI so that user admins can edit directly
- How creating ContentBox modules helps with integration to other software
- Integrate with 3rd party software such as Stripe to charge credit cards
- Integrate Full Calendar and Google Calendar API into one module
- Called from a widget
- Why are you proud to use CF?
- WWIT to make CF more alive this year?
- Community
- Education such as conferences
- Education to folks who have old info about CFML
- What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?
- Learning
- Networking
ContentBox In The Wild
ContentBox is an open source CMS ready and waiting for use in your next project. See a variety of specific real world scenarios where ContentBox has answered business needs. This demonstration will outline business needs and their associated solution using a ContentBox theme, widget, or module.
Objectives:
- Customizing Themes w/ Customized Menu Solutions
- Creating Widgets for Common Business Needs
- Developing Modules for Robust ContentBox Integration
Mentioned in this episode
- ContentBox
- ColdBox
- BootSwatch theme toggler
- ForgeBox download themes, widgets and modules
- CKTemplates – WYSIWYG editor integration
- FontAwesome icons and themes
- Code from the talk is available on ForgeBox and GitHub
- Ortus Developer week
Speaker details
Seth Engen is a co-owner of Computer Know How, a Wisconsin-based technology firm that he started with Curt Gratz in 1997. At the companies start he was introduced to CFML (version 4) and has been programming in the language ever since. Seth really enjoys creating web applications with great user interface experiences.
Links
(* WWIT = What Would It Take)
Interview transcript
Michaela Light: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Seth Engen from Computer Know How. In fact, he was the co-owner of that. Founded it quite awhile ago back when ColdFusion 4 was out. We're going to be talking about adventures with ColdFusion and ContentBox in the wild. Not just theoretical but practical. We'll check in what ContentBox is, how it's different from other open source ColdFusion CMS's, why you should be using ContentBox themes, and some of the amazing stuff you can do with them. How ContentBox widgets make it easy to program common business needs, how creating modules help with integrating ContentBox out of software. Welcome, Seth.
Seth Engen: Thanks for having me.
Michaela Light: Let's just start off for folks who don't know, what the heck is ContentBox?
Seth Engen: Well, ContentBox as the website and some of the documentation indicates is just an open source CMS, Content Management System. It's very similar to a WordPress, something like that. But for us, those familiar with ColdFusion and have written and programmed in ColdFusion over the years, ContentBox is written in ColdFusion and built on top of ColdBox. Some of the Ortus solutions suite of products, stuff we've interacted with for about as long as we've interacted with ColdFusion overall but just a really solid content management system for your use in your business and with things that you do on the web and those things that you need custom programmed. A great content management system for your use.
Michaela Light: Cool. You know, there's a lot of open source ColdFusion CMS's out there. Mura, FarCry, Preside, if I'm getting the name right. How is ContentBox different from those other than it's built on top of ColdBox?
Seth Engen: Actually that is probably the biggest difference I think. I haven't had a lot of experience with those. I think the difference, and even with other non-ColdFusion based CMS's but they've really built ContentBox with security in mind initially. Very much a modular architecture. Designed it, and we've seen this with some of our business customers and their successes, designed it to scale.
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