Today is a majestic day! A day that brings the release of our very first beta for ContentBox 5! This release has been in development for over 6 months and its a major architectural shift from our previous versions; multi-site support. You can now migrate over your Mura CMS applications with ease to ContentBox knowing that multi-tenant support is now available for all, for FREE, FOREVER!

Here is our what's new guide with our full release notes: https://contentbox.ortusbooks.com/intro/release-history/whats-new-with-5.0.0

I will be covering the major features in this introductory blog post.

Upgrading From 4.x

We are creating the migration guide right here: https://contentbox.ortusbooks.com/intro/release-history/upgrading-from-v4.x

Please bear with us as we continue to update it as work progresses.

Getting Started

To get started with ContentBox, you can easily do via CommandBox CLI CommandBox and the following commands:

mkdir mysite --cd
install contentbox-installer@5.0.0-beta-snapshot
server start

This will create a new site for you and startup a server so you can work with your site.

Tip: Check out our Installation guides for much more installation variations.

Major Features

ColdBox 6 Core

We have upgraded our core to ColdBox 6 and we have received a tremendous amounts of benefits (https://coldbox.ortusbooks.com/intro/release-history/whats-new-with-6.0.0). Here are some of the features we get with this upgrade:

• Performance, performance, performance. ColdBox 6 has been finely tuned to make your applications much more performant and stable under high load.
• Better new CFML engine support
• Asynchronous programming. We have introduced the concepts of the async package to the core and ContentBox will leverage more of these features for background job processing, automation and much more.
• New logging facilities and enhancements
• Better exception handling for developers
• REST Handlers and highly performant REST Routing
• Singleton View Rendering. You will find that all renderings are way faster than before.
• Much more!

CBSecurity 2

 

We have migrated our cbsecurity module to the latest version to give you a wealth of features (https://coldbox-security.ortusbooks.com/intro/release-history/whats-new-with-2.0.0) such as:

• Fortified rule engine
• Annotation based security engine
• JWT support
• Security Services
• Cross site request forgery support

Multi Site Support

 

This has been one of the most requested features and we where hesitant for many years to comply due to the size of the needed refactoring. However, we have finally created a great base for making ContentBox multi-tenant. You can now configure 1 or 10000 sites under the same ContentBox umbrella. The new installer actually creates two sites for you: a development/staging site and a production site. That means that you can manage different content environments all under the same deployment.

 

 

Here are some of the features you get with multi-site ContentBox:

• Ability to register an infinite number of sites
• Site detection by regular expressions or patterns on incoming URIs
• Site detection by header identifier if using the headless cms or reverse proxies
• Each site can contain its own
  • Categories
  • Blog
  • Pages
  • Content Store
  • Menus
  • Commenting System
  • Themes
• Admin site switcher
• Admin site control bar
• Clone content or entire content hierarchies from one site to the other
• Publish content directly to different sites
• Move content between sites
• Much more coming soon.

 

 

 

 

Admin UI Revamp

 

 

The entire admin UI has been revamped and streamlined. You will find it much more breathable and easier to work with especially from mobile devices and smaller screens. We are also starting to prepare a major theme change and customization that might be introduced in the final release or scheduled for a minor update.

 

 

PostgreSQL Support

 

 

We have completely changed our ORM structures and custom queries so it can be friendlier to other RDBMS. In this release we focus on portability of the host database and finally have core PostgreSQL support.

Performance

We have analyzed the entire ORM structures, queries and CFML code in this release thanks to FusionReactor's Profiler. We have streamlined the way the CMS loads and the results are impressive. The first load of ContentBox is about 70% faster than ContentBox 4. Along page executions with around 30-40% faster executions.

No More Admin Auto Updates

This is such a controversial feature to be able to deliver patches via the admin. We have completely dropped the capability to patch the CMS from within the CMS. It caused more issues than it solved and in Windows it was pretty much impossible.

We have moved to a CommandBox + Migrations approach and the results are amazing. No more broken installs, half done db updates and more. Now you can simply run two CLI commands and be done with it. Here is a typical flow for updating your system:

# stop the server
stop
# Update ColdBox and ContentBox
update coldbox,contentbox
# Run Migrations
migrate up
# start it up again
start