We are incredibly excited to announce the release of the ContentBox Modular CMS v5 series. This has been a work over 1 year with a complete refocus and rearchitecturing of the core to take ContentBox to the next 10 years. It is also great to note that we are Professional Open Source, FREE, FOREVER. This series includes tons of great features and updates that will take your content management to the next level. From multi-site support, a companion CLI, to a complete Headless CMS deployment, your will be able to deliver your projects in no time. We have also refreshed the official ContentBox site: https://www.contentboxcms.org/ which is also running 5.

Here is our what's new guide with our full release notes: https://contentbox.ortusbooks.com/intro/release-history/whats-new-with-5.0.0

Upgrading From 4.x

Our upgrade guide is ready for you to consume: https://contentbox.ortusbooks.com/intro/release-history/upgrading-from-v4.x

If you have any issues upgrading, please contact us and we will assist you in upgrading your instances.

Getting Started: ContentBox CLI

We have created a CLI tool based on CommandBox which you can use to install, upgrade and manage your ContentBox instances.

install contentbox-cli

This will install the cli for usage with ContentBox. Now we can use the install wizard to get an instance ready for running in our machines or production instances:

contentbox install-wizard

Tip: Check out our Installation guides for much more installation variations.

Major Features

ColdBox 6 Core

We have upgraded our core to ColdBox 6 and we have received a tremendous amounts of benefits (https://coldbox.ortusbooks.com/intro/release-history/whats-new-with-6.0.0). Here are some of the features we get with this upgrade:

• Performance, performance, performance. ColdBox 6 has been finely tuned to make your applications much more performant and stable under high load.
• Better new CFML engine support
• Asynchronous programming. We have introduced the concepts of the async package to the core and ContentBox will leverage more of these features for background job processing, automation and much more.
• New logging facilities and enhancements
• Better exception handling for developers
• REST Handlers and highly performant REST Routing
• Singleton View Rendering. You will find that all renderings are way faster than before.
• Much more!

CBSecurity 2

We have migrated our cbsecurity module to the latest version to give you a wealth of features (https://coldbox-security.ortusbooks.com/intro/release-history/whats-new-with-2.0.0) such as:

• Fortified rule engine
• Annotation based security engine
• JWT support
• Security Services
• Cross site request forgery support

Multi Site Support

This has been one of the most requested features and we where hesitant for many years to comply due to the size of the needed refactoring. However, we have finally created a great base for making ContentBox multi-tenant. You can now configure 1 or 10000 sites under the same ContentBox umbrella. The new installer actually creates two sites for you: a development/staging site and a production site. That means that you can manage different content environments all under the same deployment.

Here are some of the features you get with multi-site ContentBox:

• Ability to register an infinite number of sites
• Site detection by regular expressions or patterns on incoming URIs
• Site detection by header identifier if using the headless cms or reverse proxies
• Each site can contain its own
  • Categories
  • Blog
  • Pages
  • Content Store
  • Menus
  • Commenting System
  • Themes
• Admin site switcher
• Admin site control bar
• Clone content or entire content hierarchies from one site to the other
• Publish content directly to different sites
• Move content between sites
• Much more coming soon.

Headless CMS

ContentBox can now be used as a headless CMS. We have a new contentbox-api module that can be deployed by itself or alongside the admin or ui modules. This allows you to provide a fully documented RESTFul API for usage within any language or deployment scenario. You can find the full docs here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/apidocs.ortussolutions.com/contentbox/5.0.0/apidoc.html. You can also find the full open api (swagger) documentation here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/apidocs.ortussolutions.com/contentbox/5.0.0/contentbox-swagger.json.

Admin UI Revamp

The entire admin UI has been revamped and streamlined. You will find it much more breathable and easier to work with especially from mobile devices and smaller screens. We are also starting to prepare a major theme change and customization that might be introduced in the final release or scheduled for a minor update.

PostgreSQL Support

We have completely changed our ORM structures and custom queries so it can be friendlier to other RDBMS. In this release we focus on portability of the host database and finally have core PostgreSQL support.

Performance

We have analyzed the entire ORM structures, queries and CFML code in this release thanks to FusionReactor's Profiler. We have streamlined the way the CMS loads and the results are impressive. The first load of ContentBox is about 70% faster than ContentBox 4. Along page executions with around 30-40% faster executions.

No More Admin Auto Updates

This is such a controversial feature to be able to deliver patches via the admin. We have completely dropped the capability to patch the CMS from within the CMS. It caused more issues than it solved and in Windows it was pretty much impossible.

We have moved to a CommandBox + Migrations approach and the results are amazing. No more broken installs, half done db updates and more. Now you can simply run two CLI commands and be done with it. Here is a typical flow for updating your system:

# stop the server
stop
# Update ColdBox and ContentBox
update coldbox,contentbox
# Run Migrations
migrate up
# start it up again
start

Enjoy!

The 5.x series continues to be developed and we charge along for many more features to come. Enjoy!