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.

Show notes

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

 

Mentioned in this episode

ContentStore custom fields

Sass compiles CSS - CSS with superpowers

ForgeBox

Vue.js

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Esmeralda Acevedo

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