In 2006, SmallBox developed its CMS (named Boxer) with intentions of providing customers a custom web solution that would allow users to easily create, organize, edit and publish content on their website. After evaluating the popular "out of the box" content management systems available to companies at the time, we realized one thing - most content management systems are created with coders in mind, not content creators. They weren't easily customizable to fit the needs of any company using it.
So we created Boxer. Boxer exists for people who don't want to take the time to learn how to code or call a developer to help update their website. It's easy to use. It's clean. It's easy to organize your content. It's simple to understand. It's customizable and built for you.
A Custom Web Solution
One advantage Boxer has over other content management systems is that it's customizable. Over the years, it's consistently grown as needed. It's built to fit whoever is using it. One of the earliest versions of Boxer introduced an easy-to-use back end functionality that just makes sense for the user. If you need additional pages or content blocks, the drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to implement in your site.
Other features added throughout the years are Boxer's Form Builder and Active FAQ. Form Builder allows users to create their own forms rather than going through a third party vendor or installing a plugin or widget.
The Active FAQ functionality gives you the ability to solicit questions from your customers and publish the questions and answers as their own landing pages for SEO purposes.
Boxer has seen multiple versions throughout the years and is constantly being updated. SmallBox Developer, Jordan Wilson has been behind the scenes for the majority of Boxer's updates - especially recently. He sat down for a question-answer session about Boxer, how decisions are made about updates, what are some of the most recent modules and more. Take a look below.
Q: How old is this current version of Boxer?
Jordan: The current master version of the CMS is about two years old. However, every time I build a website for a client, it seems I'm tweaking and customizing something in the CMS to whatever fits the client's needs and also makes the most sense from a development standpoint.
Q: So it seems that Boxer is always changing, right?
Jordan: Yeah it really is. We build the functionality and scale it to fit the client. The goal is for it to be most effective for a client's site. A recent example of this is our FAQ module. It started out as simple FAQ functionality - two fields, one for question and one for answer, very simple. But we decided to build all kinds of functionality into it where the FAQ is capable of some pretty amazing things - but not all necessary or efficient for our customers. That's how we discovered and built the current version, the Active FAQ. We took something really big and broad and scaled it to fit our cients.
Q: What is one of the most recent modules added to Boxer?
Jordan: The Search functionality. I discovered that some of the search engine API's available were either discontinued or not effective for our purposes, so I understood we needed to build our own Search functionality into the CMS. The search we've implemented is built to bring up the most relevant results for someone on one of our client's websites. It's currently being tested on a few sites and through time, we'll discover if it's a permanent addition that needs to be made to the master CMS.
Q: What's new about the most recent version of Boxer?
Jordan: We started using a javascript library jQuery that makes more tools and commands available to us as developers.
Q: What's in store for the future of the CMS?
Jordan: We really determine that based on feedback from clients and what we determine is necessary as we're continuously building out new functionality and updating the CMS. It's not something we plan far in advance. That's the beauty of being a company who customizes solutions for clients. If there's a better way to build something or update something, we discover that as we continue to work and research.
