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Just a reminder that this Thursday we will have a ContentBox connection to review the major functionality of ContentBox version 1.2.0 and sneek peeks at our upcoming version. Remember that our ContentBox Connection is a FREE bi-weekly seminar focusing on ContentBox and technology.  See you there!

We just updated ContentBox to version 1.2.0 as a Railo extension.  So any Railo powered server can now enjoy ContentBox with a few clicks.

Step 1: Log in to the web administrator of your Railo server

Step 2: Click on the Applications Menu item

We are happy that we are at it again and released version 1.2.0 of ContentBox Modular CMS.  This release is definitely huge in magnitude with over 50 tickets resolved.  We are also hard at work in our next sprint which will include lots of new goodies plus our initial documentation and UI change pushes.  So expect a lot more in the coming months as we pick up steam.  You can view our release notes in our new documentation pages to see all the changes and fixes.  Below we will focus on the major features of this release.

Security Checker

ContentBox now checks your installation for potential security risks and allows you to take action.  It also uses the OWASP AntiSamy plugin in ColdBox to sanitize all user input from XSS attacks.

Global Search

ContentBox now sports a fancy Global Search for all kinds of content in your box :).  You can easily search from anywhere in the admin for Content, Custom HTML, Blog Entries, and even users.

If your site ever displays text on the page that end users have control over, you should be concerned about XSS attacks.  This could come in the form of user comments at the bottom of an article, user-generated content, or user profile information.  In many instances, the user should never be entering any HTML and you might simply fully escape that text with HTMLEditFormat() or EncodeForHTML() as you output it.

Other times you may be dealing with a forum or message board t...

We are so excited to welcome our new product in the Ortus Solutions lineup; DataBoss : Dynamic Administrator.  Here is a little brief overview about DataBoss and how it can help you as a developer and also as a company.  DataBoss is powered by Co...

We are proud to announce today the public release of our product Ortus DataBoss.  We have been working on this product for a few years now and finally it has reached its culmination and is ready available for purchase.  So let me introduce to you our new brain child: DataBoss.

What is DataBoss?

Ortus DataBoss is an application that will help you manage CFML Object Relational Mapper (ORM) objects without the need of writing administrative code for them; thus a Dynamic Administrator.  DataBoss will talk to the underlying ORM engine (Hibernate) and get all the necessary information to manage all the ORM entities and its relationships in that specific CFML application DataBoss has been deployed to.  You can watch our introductory video to get a quick overview of what DataBoss is and how it can benefit your development.

The Query Helper plugin is a hidden gem in ColdBox.  This plugin has a handful of super useful functions you can perform against query objects-- some of which you may have gone out of your way to write on your own in the past, or just simply lived without.  Here a brief list of my favorite functions from the Query Helper plugin that allow you to do sweet one-line manipulations of one or more query objects:

filterQuery
Pare down a result set to only ...

Thanks to team member Sana Ullah, we have upgraded our Groovy Loader project to version 3.0.  This version includes several updates like it sports a new interceptor called GroovyStarter that you can configure in your configuration file and the entire groovy environment will wrap itself and become available in any ColdBox 3.5 application.

Not only that, but now you can also add any amount of java and groovy library locations and the plugin will load them at startup into your application.  These libraries can be Spring, Hibernate, Apache Commons, etc.  Finally, what good is a project without documentation, so we now have the project fully documented: http://wiki.coldbox.org/wiki/Projects:GroovyLoader.cfm