CBX on Magento 2 — Platform Guide
- Version
- 3.x
- Updated
Audience: integrators and developers running CBX on Magento 2 · Scope: what is different about the Magento 2 edition — installation, the admin area, connecting products, and which jobs Magento handles instead of CBX · Last reviewed: 2026-07-21
Store admins: the task-oriented manual is the Admin Guide — start with its CBX on Magento 2 section, which covers the division of labor and product connection in plain language. This document is the technical counterpart.
TL;DR — On Magento 2, CBX is the configurator engine only; Magento is the shop.
You build products, questions, rules and calculations in CBX (Configbox >
Administration in the Magento backend) and attach a CBX product to a Magento catalog
product via a custom option of type "CBX Configuration". Cart, checkout, orders,
customers, emails, tax and currency are all Magento's — CBX's own commerce screens are
hidden on this platform. Updates ride on composer + bin/magento setup:upgrade.
1. Division of labor — what Magento owns, what CBX owns
This is the one table to internalize; it decides which parts of the general CBX documentation apply to you. In one picture: CBX produces the configured item, and everything from the cart onward is Magento's.
| Concern | Owned by | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Product configurator (pages, questions, answers, rules, calculations, visualization) | CBX | The whole configurator-building reference applies unchanged. |
| Product catalog, listings, product pages | Magento | CBX's own product listings are not used. |
| Cart & checkout | Magento | The configured item goes into Magento's cart as a product with a custom option; Magento runs checkout. CBX has no storefront checkout here. |
| Orders & order management | Magento | Configured selections, SKUs and prices are embedded in the Magento order line item. CBX's Orders screen is hidden. |
| Customers & accounts | Magento | Shoppers are Magento customers/guests. CBX does not manage identities on this platform. |
| Transactional email | Magento | CBX sends no email on Magento — order confirmations etc. are Magento's. CBX's Notifications screen is hidden. |
| Tax | Magento | CBX reads the Magento product's tax class/rate so configurator prices match the store. |
| Currency & price display | Magento | Store currency and locale come from Magento's store configuration. |
| Languages | Magento (store views) | CBX derives its language list from the locales of your Magento store views; translatable CBX content gets one tab per store-view language. |
| Shipping & payment methods | Magento | CBX's shipping/payment screens are hidden. |
| Discounts & promotions | Magento (cart rules) | CBX pricing produces the item price; Magento cart price rules apply on top. |
2. Installing and updating
CBX ships as two Composer packages: rovexo/configbox-magento2 (the Magento module,
Rovexo_Configbox) and rovexo/configbox-php (the platform-independent engine it depends on).
composer require rovexo/configbox-magento2
bin/magento module:enable Rovexo_Configbox
bin/magento setup:upgrade
The pieces layer like this — the module plugs CBX into Magento, the engine underneath
is platform-independent, and setup:upgrade is what touches the database:
- Database setup and every later schema/data update run inside
setup:upgrade. The module registers a recurring setup step that applies CBX's own migration scripts — there is no separate CBX installer or update button. After acomposer updateof the CBX packages, runbin/magento setup:upgradeas you would for any module. - PHP requirement: the pricing/rule engine ships ionCube-encoded; the server needs the ionCube Loader matching your PHP version.
- License: CBX licenses are domain-bound. If the license is missing or expired, a notice dialog appears in the Magento backend with a link to enter a new key (license management lives in the CBX dashboard). Staging/dev hostnames need to be whitelisted for your key — contact Rovexo support with the hostname.
- CLI: the full
configbox:*command suite is registered onbin/magento— cache clearing, migrations (configbox:migrate,configbox:migrate:unblock), reading/writing settings from scripts (configbox:config:*), and task running. See the CLI commands reference; the commands are identical on every platform, only the binary (bin/magento) differs.
3. The CBX area in the Magento backend
- Menu: a top-level Configbox entry with a single item, Administration. It opens the complete CBX admin (one embedded application) — dashboard, product tree, calculations, settings. There are no further Magento menu entries or grids.
- Permissions: one ACL resource (
Rovexo_Configbox::administration) controls access — all-or-nothing. A role either gets the whole CBX area or none of it; there is no per-screen CBX ACL. Inside the area, CBX trusts the Magento backend login. - Nothing under Stores > Configuration. CBX deliberately adds no section to
Magento's system configuration. All CBX settings live in the CBX area's own
Settings screen (or via
bin/magento configbox:config:*). - Reduced menu compared to Joomla/WordPress: because Magento owns commerce (§1), the CBX admin menu on Magento shows only Dashboard, Products, Calculations, Settings. Orders, Customers, Reviews, Product Lists, Countries/States, Shipping, Payment Methods, Store Information, Customer Fields and Notifications are hidden — those jobs are done in the corresponding Magento screens. The Settings screen likewise hides options that only make sense with CBX's own cart/checkout.
4. Making a Magento product configurable
A CBX product is attached to a Magento catalog product through a custom option:
- Build the product in CBX first (Configbox > Administration > Products) — pages, questions, answers, rules, calculations, as in the configurator-building reference.
- Edit (or create) the Magento product: Catalog > Products > … > Customizable Options > Add Option.
- Set the option type to "CBX Configuration" (under the rovexo group) and pick the CBX product from the dropdown that appears.
- Save. The configurator now renders automatically on that product's storefront page — in the product-options area, with the visualization in the media/gallery area. No widget, CMS block or manual placement is needed (or possible); the custom option is the only attachment point.
The attachment, in one picture — the custom option is the only link between the two products, and it is also what makes the configurator appear on the storefront page:
The CBX↔Magento product link is kept in a mapping maintained on product save/delete, and survives product duplication — duplicating the Magento product copies the link to the same CBX product.
One CBX custom option per Magento product. The product link supports exactly one CBX product; adding a second CBX option is not supported and silently keeps only one of the links.
5. What happens in cart, checkout and orders
When the customer adds a configured product to the cart, CBX stores the full configuration in its own tables and writes a summary into the Magento quote item's custom option value: the selected answers as formatted text, the answer SKUs, and the net/gross totals. From there on the flow is pure Magento:
- The cart and checkout show the configured selections as the custom option's value; the item price is the CBX-calculated price (tax per the product's Magento tax class).
- The Magento order carries the same selection summary and SKUs on the line item — this is what fulfilment works from (answer SKUs are set on CBX answers; see the configurator-building reference).
- Wishlists work: the configuration is preserved when a configured product is added to a wishlist and later moved to the cart.
- There is no CBX order record to manage; do not look for orders inside the CBX area (the screen does not exist on Magento). Order status, invoices, credit memos, shipment and all emails are standard Magento.
The whole handoff as a sequence:
CBX features that are part of its own checkout on other platforms — quotation/RFQ flow, saved carts, CBX customer accounts, CBX reviews — are not available on Magento; use Magento equivalents where they exist.
6. Storefront behavior notes
- URLs: CBX storefront requests (configurator AJAX etc.) all go through
<store-url>/configbox/index/index?controller=…&task=…and carry Magento'sform_key. There are no per-view "pretty" CBX URLs on Magento — relevant when reading logs or debugging with support. - Content Security Policy: the module ships a CSP whitelist for the external hosts
CBX may use (
*.shapediver.comfor 3D visualization,*.fontawesome.com,*.configbox.at,data:images). If you run a custom CSP setup in restrict mode and see blocked resources on configurator pages, check these hosts first. - Caching: CBX caches product/configurator structure server-side (APCu when available,
file cache otherwise). Normal admin edits invalidate caches themselves. After changing CBX
data outside the admin UI (imports, direct DB work), clear with
bin/magento configbox:cache:clear— or simply flush the Magento cache:bin/magento cache:flush/cache:cleanand the admin's Cache Management buttons clear the CBX caches too (the module observes Magento's cache-flush events; CLI clears reach web APCu via a shared cache-generation stamp).
All the cache-clearing paths converge on the same cache:
7. Reading map — the general docs from a Magento seat
| Doc | On Magento 2 |
|---|---|
| Admin Guide | The admin-facing manual — its Magento 2 section says which of its systems apply here. Point store admins there first. |
| Configurator building | Fully applies — the deep functional reference behind the Admin Guide's product articles. |
| Rule authoring / Calculation authoring | Fully apply. |
| Configuration & settings | Applies to the sections your Settings screen shows; commerce/checkout sections are hidden on Magento (§3). |
| Commerce setup | Not used — currencies, tax, geography, shipping, payment are Magento's (§1). |
| Operations | Mostly not used — orders/customers/reviews/notifications are Magento's. The Dashboard and License sections still apply. |
| Frontend user stories | The browse/configure epics apply; cart, checkout, orders, account and reviews happen in Magento. |
| CLI commands | Fully applies, via bin/magento. |
8. Gotchas
- Don't search Stores > Configuration for CBX settings — there are none; use Configbox > Administration > Settings.
- Don't expect CBX to send any email on Magento. If a mail-dependent CBX feature from another platform is mentioned in the docs, it does not fire here.
- Run
bin/magento setup:upgradeafter every CBX composer update — skipping it leaves CBX's database migrations unapplied (a failed migration blocks further updates untilconfigbox:migrate:unblock). - A staging copy under a different hostname needs its own license whitelisting — domain-bound licensing (§2) otherwise degrades rules/features there.
- Template/asset customizations belong in the optional companion module
Rovexo_ConfigboxCustomizations, not in the module or library themselves — see the customization overview.