Apostrophe 3.53.0 New document template library feature, user settings menu with UI language locking, better accessibility, and fixes

[BoDonkey]

Joyeux noël, Apostrophiles!
I can hear you all asking, "BoDonkey, what kind of breakfast cereal did you eat this morning!?" Well, on this release day, we have published or updated 12 modules! (Get it, 12 days of Christmas?) 🎄

The big feature that we are excited about is the Template Library extension! This Pro module allows for the creation of templates for pages and piece types. These templates can be pre-populated with content, such as a series of specific widgets added to an area, that can then be reused throughout your project. Banish the blank page paralysis!

Another great feature included in this release is the ability to "lock" the Admin UI to a specific language, even if the locale is changed to a different language. This feature also includes the ability to add a highly customizable "Personal Settings" menu that allows a user to change their password, select the Admin language, and make developer-defined changes to their account. Check out the documentation for the new @apostrophecms/settings module.

Speaking of core, this cycle saw a plethora of improvements. This includes improvements to the Admin UI accessibility, a new schema field of hidden to help with conditional display, and changes to document handling. We also have chased down a number of bugs, including one that was flagged and then eliminated by community member Joshua N. Miller. Thanks!🎉 Check out the changelog below for all of the details.

While looking through the changelogs, you may also notice that the @apostrophecms/cli utility received an update. You might have also gotten a notification to update in your terminal. If you did update and are looking to start a new project, I can't stop you from trying apos create my-project --starter=ecommerce 😉. More announcements about this to come soon!

In this next cycle, we will be working on two great new features. First, we are working on a document export/import functionality that will allow you to share documents between projects. Second, we are making significant improvements to Apostrophe logging. As usual, we welcome any community improvements, bug fixes, and suggestions!

Remember npm update gets you the latest and greatest right in your project.

Apostrophe 3.35.0

Adds

• Accessibility improved for navigation inside modals and various UI elements.
  Pages/Docs Manager and Doc Editor modal now have better keyboard accessibility.
  They keep the focus on elements inside modals and give it back to their parent modal when closed.
  This implementation is evolving and will likely switch to use the dialog HTML element soon.
• Adds support for a new if property in addContextOperation in order to show or not a context operation based on the current document properties.
• Add update-doc-fields event to call AposDocEditor.updateDocFields method
• Add schema field hidden property to always hide a field
• Hide empty schema tabs in AposDocEditor when all fields are hidden due to if conditions
• The front end UI now respects the _aposEditorModal and _aposAutopublish
  properties of a document if present, and otherwise falls back to module
  configuration. This is a powerful addition to custom editor components
  for piece and page types, allowing "virtual piece types" on the back end that
  deal with many content types to give better hints to the UI.
• Respect the _aposAutopublish property of a document if present, otherwise
  fall back to module configuration.
• For convenience in custom editor components, pass the new prop type, the original type of the document being copied or edited.
• For better results in custom editor components, pass the prop copyOfId, which implies
  the custom editor should fetch the original itself by its means of choice.
  For backwards compatibility copyOf is still passed, but it may be an
  incomplete projection and should not be used in new code.
• Custom context operations now receive a docId prop, which should
  be used in preference to doc because doc may be an incomplete
  projection.
• Those creating custom context operations for documents can now
  specify both a props object for additional properties to be passed to
  their modal and a docProps object to map properties from the document
  to props of their choosing.
• Adds support to add context labels in admin bar.
• Adds support for admin UI language configuration in the @apostrophecms/i18n module. The new options allow control over the default admin UI language and configures the list of languages, that any individual logged in user can choose from. See the documentation for more details.
• Adds adminLocale User field to allow users to set their preferred admin UI language, but only when the @apostrophecms/i18n is configured accordingly (see above).
• Adds @apostrophecms/settings module and a "Personal Settings" feature. See the documentation for more details.
• Adds $and operator on addContextOperation if property in order to check multiple fields before showing or hiding a context operation.

Fixes

• AposDocEditor onSave method signature. We now always expect an object when a parameter is passed to the function to check
  the value of navigate flag.
• Fixes a problem in the rich text editor where the slash would not be deleted after item selection from the insert menu.
• Modules that have a public or i18n subdirectory no longer generate a
  warning if they export no code.
• Clean up focus parent event handlers when components are destroyed. Prevents a slow degradation of performance while editing.
  Thanks to Joshua N. Miller.
• Fixes a visual discrepancy in the rich text editor where empty paragraphs would appear smaller in preview mode compared to edit mode.

Changes

• To make life easier for module developers, modules that are npm linked to
  the project no longer have to be listed in package.json as
  dependencies. To prevent surprises this is still a requirement for modules
  that are not symlinked.

Apostrophe 3.x modules

@apostrophecms/piece-type-importer 1.1.1

This module adds an optional import feature to all piece type modules in an Apostrophe project. This feature enables importing pieces from CSV files where it is configured.

Fixes

• Strip the UTF-8 BOM from CSV files. Otherwise the name of the first column is not correctly parsed.

@apostrophecms/import-a2-tags 1.0.1

While Apostrophe 2 documents have a tags array field, this field doesn't exist in Apostrophe 3. Instead, tags are represented as relationships to a "tag piece type" if and when this is desired in a particular project.

Fixes

• Fixed bugs relating to localization, modes and the need to use aposDocId rather than _id.
• Also, populate tagsFields with empty objects to exactly match normal behavior for these relationships.

@apostrophecms/ai-helper 1.0.0-beta.3

This module enhances Apostrophe with AI-driven helpers. Currently this module offers:

• A button to generate an image from a text prompt via OpenAI.
• An insert menu option to generate rich text from a prompt via OpenAI.

See the README for more info.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug in the "variants" feature caused by premature PNG to JPEG
  conversion. This now happens only when inserting into the media library.

Pro modules

@apostrophecms-pro/multisite 3.12.0

This module lets you have many ApostropheCMS websites running on a single codebase in a single Node.js process. Each has its own database, users, media uploads, etc. Sites can be created and managed via a dashboard site. Contact us or visit our new pricing page to learn more.

Adds

• The function exported by sites/index.js may now be an async function and will be awaited.

@apostrophecms-pro/doc-template-library 1.0.0

This module solves the "blank page problem" for developers and product managers, and makes it faster for editors to create content. doc-template-library allows for the configuration of default widgets and pre-populated content on piece or page templates, and to re-use existing layouts. Contact us or visit our new pricing page to learn more.

Adds

• Initial stable release.

@apostrophecms-pro/document-versions 1.1.1

This module automatically creates versions for your published documents (pages and pieces) and allows manual restore to any previously saved document version. Contact us or visit our new pricing page to learn more.

Fixes

• Fix compatibility issue with new sidebar format (adding support for isVisible in Apostrophe 3.53.0)

@apostrophecms-pro/cypress-tools 1.0.0-beta.8

Automated functional browser tests are an important part of quality assurance for enterprise websites and web applications. Cypress is an industry-standard, open-source library for carrying out automated functional browser tests. This module provides a collection of conveniences for testing ApostropheCMS sites and applications within Cypress. Contact us or visit our new pricing page to learn more.

Adds

• Add support for Cypress 12+

Apostrophe 2.x modules

apostrophe-pieces-import 2.3.2

This module adds an optional import feature to all apostrophe-pieces in an Apostrophe project.

Fixes

• Strip the UTF-8 BOM so that the first column's name is parsed correctly.

Utilities

uploadfs 1.22.2

uploadfs copies files to a web-accessible location and provides a consistent way to get the URLs that correspond to those files. uploadfs can also resize, crop and autorotate uploaded images. uploadfs includes S3-based, Azure-based, GCS-based and local filesystem-based backends and you may supply others.

Changed

• Bump to next major version of google cloud storage API to please npm audit. There was no actual security vulnerability due to the way the module in question was actually used.
• Update our eslint configuration.
• Modernize the source from var to const and let in all cases to satisfy eslint and help prevent future bugs. This does not change the behavior of the code.

@apostrophecms/eslint-config-apostrophe 4.1.0

An ESLint configuration for ApostropheCMS core and officials modules.

Changed

• Use latest eslint-config-standard

@apostrophecms/cli 3.2.0

The Apostrophe CLI is a cross-platform starting point for creating and configuring ApostropheCMS projects, providing a simple boilerplate generator and wrapping other useful functions into an easy to use command line tool.

Adds

• Adds additional options to the --starter flag to make use of the starter kits easier. Also adds fallbacks for obtaining templates from other repositories.
• Changes the config.js file to reflect the new name for the old a3-boilerplate template repo, starter-kit-essentials