As we continue with our 12 Tips of (ContentBox) Christmas, we at Ortus Solutions are giving you a gift of developer productivity, we will share a few tips and tricks that will keep giving all year around. Brad Wood is also doing 12 Tips of (CommandBox) Christmas.

When you or your team log into your ContentBox site, you see your ContentBox Dashboard. You can see recent content, recent comments, recent news, some data snapshots… but you can also quickly customize this to help your team communicate. It is as easy as changing a few ContentBox admin settings.

Click on System > Settings and then click on Admin Options.

You can change the Title / Welcome that shows up on the dashboard.

'Welcome to the Dark Side - The Admin'

You can update the Dashboard message, so when everyone logs in, they're reminded of some of your rules, regulations, or maybe a holiday message. As seen above:

Blog posts should be scheduled for daily at 7am PST to ensure better readability.
All Blog posts should be included with an image.
Images should be 800x200.
Ensure all posts have their own SEO content.

One of the nice touches I think, is you can update the NEWS RSS feed. This allows you to add some humor to your day, by adding something like Dilbert's RSS feed… or maybe you can use an aggregator to follow what is happening in the CFML world, or maybe some blogs which you need to read and then update your audience.

Want to go further than these options? ContentBox is modular, so you can extend the admin with modules. There are many use cases for how to extend the admin, some of the most common include

• Hiding Menus for all users, regardless of Permissions
• Changing Colors
• Switching out the ContentBox Logo

Of course you can also tap into many of the events available, to do things like, creating thumbnails automatically when jpg images are uploaded, or post messages to slack when new content is created. That's the beauty of ContentBox, its an event based content management system you can tailor to your needs.

The options are there, some of them as easy as editing the admin options, others, you might have to dust off your editor and write some code.