Guust Nieuwenhuis talks about “MASA ColdFusion CMS (new open source Content Manager)” in this episode of the ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

"he’s joining us to talk about MASA CMS, a new CMS launched about a year and a half ago. It’s a fork out of the famous Muira CMS. And we’ll talk about why you even want to use a CMS at all, we’ve got some astounding statistics out of the confusion. State of the Union survey will be run every year that I think are important regarding this.”

Show notes

What is MASA?

ColdFusion Entrepreneur CMS

What is a CMS?

Content Management System

Store content in a database rather than hard coding in CF files

Letting users at your organization edit content directly

Avoids delays from developers updating content

Or users editing CFM files directly and creating bugs in your code

Workflow and control of content updates

Why use a CMS?

Better control of content edits

Safer 

Better features

What CMSes do CFers use?

State of CF Union survey 

Why MASA?

Introduction to MASA CMS

Roots in Mura CMS (open source version 7.1)

1.5 years ago fork from Mura

Rebrand

Legal check

Removed commercial software dependencies so it is 

GPL 2 license 

Source, docs and discussion hosted on GitHub  

Mura changed to closed source in version 10

Enterprise Content Management

Features

User roles, Workflow, version sets, content staging (previous draft)

EU website store sales rules

Security

Features of MASA CMS

UX easy to use

Documentation  

https://docs.masacms.com/ 

New Admin file browser

Layout manager - WYSIWYG drag and drop modules into your content page

Inline edits

Themes

Look and feel of while site, CSS, colors etc

Custom modules

Plugins

Non-visual functionality customization

Admin functionality

Modules

Visual element with code

Widgets 

Text box

Image gallery

Video

Etc

Events

Rich event lifecycle 

Clear naming convention

Many hooks to let you customize MASA using custom plugins

Eg OnBeforeContentSave, OnAfterContentSave

OO approach is good for MASA and not required

ORM and beans

API

Front end JavaScipt access to MASA via API

Adobe API

M-tag 

When creating content in Masa CMS you use the [m] tag for rendering dynamic content. This is a very powerful way to access CFML and Masa functionality. Call CF custom functions from your content. 

Workflows

Create a custom group workflow

MASA statistics

Thousands of content pages

Hundreds of content editors/approvers

Mura backward compatibility

Very easy from the latest Mura open source version (7.1) - just a config file

For earlier versions of Mura, you need to update a bit more in the code.

Guust’s company can help with this. 

Future MASA versions have semantic versioning (https://semver.org/) eg 7.4.1

Major version number = 7

May have breaking changes or big changes

A minor version number with the Major = 4

No breaking changes

Batch version number within the Minor = 1

Small bug fixes

Ember.js is a good example of version numbers

6-week minor version release cycle

When enough changes they roll up all the minor versions to a new major version with depreciations of old features. 

Deployment options on different infrastructure

ACF

Lucee

Cloud and Docker

MySQL, SQL Server, Progress, Oracle

Test suite 

What is the plan for new features?

Roadmap

Headless CMS

Content Mobile

Decoupled CMS

Static content edited via admin in a separate site

How many versions does MASA have so far?

Support agreements

MASA cloud hosting

Going to CFCamp

Mentioned in this episode