Yes, that’s not a typo, we really mean it: FREE forever! ContentBox, our modular content management engine that allows you to easily build websites, blogs, wikis, complex web applications, and RESTFul web services, will always, and we repeat, always be Open Source and FREE. You can use all of its goodies and features when you want them and wherever you want them.
Ortus Solutions has been, is and will continue to be a professional open source company at its core. Open source is in our DNA and part of who we are. We are willing to go the extra mile so our community can have the tools it needs to grow, foster and evolve. Our focus and dedication to Open Source is stronger than ever and our mindset is now focused on building more products, enhancing existing ones and continuing to take our community to new modern levels.
With the release of our MVC framework: ColdBox; we are now laser-focused on the next generation of development for ContentBox CMS. We are taking our solid core and re-architecting it with ColdBox 6 and moving it forward with an API centric approach to all of its parts. So let’s start discovering:
Here are some interesting points:
- ContentBox runs on the ColdBox Platform, the most popular and fully-featured HMVC framework for ColdFusion (CFML). The ContentBox infrastructure has been designed using a rich Object Oriented content model powered by Hibernate, the de-facto standard Object Relational Mapper, and can run in any Java environment. Our entire infrastructure is built with scalability and cloud deployment in mind.
- It will be FREE FOREVER - Why may you ask? Simple. Our funding strategy has been designed in a way where we can offer professional open source training, custom designs and consulting and then we allocate 20% of our proceeds to fund our open source work.
- ColdBox and ContentBox are used for all of our client work so we’re constantly evolving and improving their frameworks and CMS and giving you all the updates for free.
If that’s not enough, let us show you what we’ve been doing just this past year:
We released a ContentBox Docker Image v.5.0.0, which is built upon CommandBox so it has everything plus:
- Datasource Config
- Distributed caching for content, rss etc
- Environment into ContentBox settings
- Embedded H2 DB support
- And much more!
We’ve upgraded to the latest CommandBox Image 2.8.0, bringing with it all the image goodness such as: size optimizations, latest CommandBox binaries, latest Lucee binaries, improved startup times, the ability to do multi-stage builds and much more!
We have also refactored the entire image creation which now gives us a whooping 400 - 600mb in size savings from previous versions.
We have added -x to the scripts to allow you to see the command that runs for info purposes.
We have updated health checks to include start-periods and also better timeouts and intervals.
We are not done yet, we will be updating our images again in September with new CommandBox support and ContentBox 5 Beta!
But you may also want to know, what’s to come?
ContentBox v5 is now in full development.
As we write this article, ContentBox v5 has already been upgraded to work with ColdBox 6 and CBSecurity 2. This update alone has transformed the CMS already. It has introduced performance enhancements across the board of over 5-fold. All the benefits and enhancements introduced to ColdBox6 from asynchronous computations, asynchronous logging and pipelines, rendering enhancements and so much more are evident now.
CBSecurity introduces even more features to increase our capabilities of our security firewall, JWT (JSON Web Tokens) for API calls, JWT storages, CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery), standardized authentication support and so much more. Security is one of our most important features surrounding ContentBox, where you can deploy the Admin module in complete isolation or even deploy your site statically or serverless.
We are also doing a complete overhaul of the ContentBox core module so it can be API-first. API capabilities already exist within ContentBox, but we are making them centric in v5. We will continue to revamp the ContentBox core to introduce the native ColdBox RESTHandler, the new mementifier module for GraphQL capabilities into the new RESTFul services, scheduled tasks and much more. This API core will also introduce several new features and capabilities such as a detached CLI manager, new ADMIN UI interfaces, and new language SDKs for building/consuming content.
And finally, work has begun on multi-tenant support for ContentBox CMS. This has been a long-requested feature, which was never scheduled to be built due to the world of microservices and containers we live on. We believe that by empowering developers to manage 1 or 1000 sites within the same ContentBox deployment is something we are willing to bet on and our new core frameworks will give us a tremendous advantage over our competitors.
We need you!
We are excited as we continue to push forward innovation around our community, but we need your help. We cannot go anywhere without you. This is a community project, a community effort. If you win, we win. There are not many CMS projects for ColdFusion (CFML) that are open source anymore, that’s a fact. This is an opportunity for you to be involved, to make your mark, to get out of legacy/maintenance mode hell and shine in modern land! We have the tools to build ANYTHING we want and better than in many other languages.
We need inspiring people to help us with our vision of transforming our industry with these open source projects. Whether you help us build the core, or help us by testing, or documentation or just cheering us along, every bit helps. You can be part of these innovations, be part of conquering one app at a time.
Ways to collaborate:
- Fork
- Star
- Help with Docs
- Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, Find us on LinkedIn
- Join Slack
Ways to support us
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