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ColdBox Plugins have graduated to become just models. The plugins convention has been removed and all references to plugin injection or DSL's are gone. You must now place all your plugins in your models directory and request them via getInstance() or getModel() calls.

Plugins are an old ColdBox convention but their baggage doesn't really serve a purpose now that we have modules for easy packaging of libraries and WireBox for easy creation of CFCs. Neither of those existed back when Plugins were birthed. It's time to say goodbye to the concept of plugins, but all their functionality will still be here, just with a slightly different (and more standardized) way of creating them.

If you have a ColdBox config setting UDFLibraryFile, then you'll want to change it when upgrading to ColdBox 4.0. It functions the same, but is now called applicationHelper.

applicationHelper is an optional setting where you can declare the path to a UDF template to load for usage in the views, layouts and event handlers. You can use relative paths to your application's root or ColdFusion mappings.

For example if I have my udf templat...

With the advent of so much more functionality in modules, in ColdBox 4 we added the ability to group modules in a single directory we lovingly call The Module Bundle.  This feature became a reality due to a real client's need of being able to logically separate modules into logical buckets.  His application had an extensive amount of modules and he wanted to further segregate them, thus module bundles became a reality.  

If you have been following our series here on ColdBox 4.0, you are probably sensing a theme.  

Another major change in ColdBox 4.0 was the removal of plugins as a thing.  They were just model objects anyway and we had treated them as such within the framework for some time.   However, because of that, we needed to do something with some of our various "core" plugins.  So sticking with our...

ColdBox 4.0 is a major release for the ColdBox line. The most major since its original release in June 2006. To boost efficency and open up options, we've removed a lot of non-necessary items from the core installation and made them available through modular architecture instead. However, there are some thing that we've kept - and for good reason. This post discusses what we kept in the core of ColdBox 4.0 and why.

Welcome to the jungle

Remember a time when the internet was a safe place. Where your email wasn't getting hacked every 3 months, nobody wanted to XSS something malicious to you or through you, and no one conceived of encrypting your hard drive for money?

I don't either. Since its inception, the internet has been a jungle of security complications.

CSRF: not the good kind of surfi...

ColdBox allows you to store the details of your CF datasources in your configuration file.  This prevents you from needing to store usernames and passwords in  your actual code, and allows you  to easily switch an application to another database, even with the environment control.  In  the past this datasource information was presented to you as a CFC object with getter methods.  

In ColdBox 4.0 we recognized that the datasource bean was really just a value object with no behaviors-- only data.  In the spirit of simplification,  we've replaced the datasource bean with a standard struct of data.

If you've ever worked with jars or raw java in ColdFusion, you will love the JavaLoader module for ColdBox. The JavaLoader module will interface with Mark Mandel's JavaLoader to allow you to do a network class loader, compiler and proxy. You can keep jars with your application's code instead of putting them in ColdFusion classpath, and you can even dynamically compile java co...

Since the early ColdBox 2 versions we had the ability to declare helpers for our layouts and views by creating a file right next to the view and adding the suffix Helper to it.  This would allow the framework to bind the two templates together at run-time.  This is a great way to provide further separation by convention.  However, there was no way to affect layouts and views globally.  You only had the global application helper which injected functions and...

Looking to secure your ColdBox application?  The Security Module can be your security rules engine for your application.  It provides flexible options to rules based security for you to use.

We have often talked about how a module can be either complex or as simple as an interceptor.  Our Security Module is basically just an interceptor that gets registered in your application to enforce rules you define.  Installing it is easy u...