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

Twitter

Computer Know How

(* 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,