The Winter CMS maintainers are proud to announce that version 1.2.8 of Winter CMS is now available for download, bringing in many quality-of-life improvements and fixes for our users, and laying in the groundwork for some major upcoming improvements.
You may update your Winter CMS installation automatically by running composer update in the root folder of your Winter project. In addition, it is recommended that you update your plugins, especially the first-party Winter plugins in order to take advantage of the new improvements.
Here's a couple of the major changes that were made in this release:
New error log viewer
The error log viewer in the Backend has had a massive upgrade, improving the look of the page and the data within, and providing a lot more critical information on errors occurring in Winter CMS. It still maintains the dual "formatted" and "raw" screens, but the "formatted" screen now provides a lot of additional context such as the environment, whether the error occurred in the backend or in testing, and formats the code preview and exception stack trace in a way that is easy to parse and review everything leading up to the error.
Due to this additional context requiring some changes to our error handling, this additional context will only be available for any new errors encountered after the upgrade to version 1.2.8. For errors encountered before the upgrade, the original error log view will be displayed.
Default views for Backend controllers
In all previous versions of Winter CMS, you were required to create views for the standard lists and form pages in your controllers, even if you wanted to simlpy use the default list or form content. This meant creating an index.php, create.php, update.php and preview.php each time you set up a controller, and copying over the default code from either the core Winter code or using the samples provided in the documentation.
In version 1.2.8, this is no longer necessary. If you do not create these files for your controllers, Winter will automatically use a default view in its place, which will display the list or form in its default format. This will make it a lot easier to create new sections within your Backend and removes a seemingly unnecessary step that slowed things down.
You can still, of course, create those files if you wish to use a customised view for your controller. If the files do exist, they will be used over the default views.
New button and url field types and improved email field type
A new field type - button - has been made available for form configurations, allowing developers to quickly add a button with custom behavior to their forms without needing to set up a partial and inserting JavaScript. These buttons support triggering AJAX requests, opening popups or acting as a simple link to a URL.
Using this new field type opens up additional flexibility for your forms to trigger actions not normally available in forms.
Another new field type - url can allow people to enter in URLs in their forms safely, with full validation of the value and the option to provide autocomplete options with a list of pre-filled URLs.
Finally, we have added icons to the url field and the email field to be able to visually differentiate these fields from other fields in the form, and make it clearer as to the expected input for these fields.
List & filter improvements
The lists and filters have had a lot of love applied in this release, with multiple tweaks and improvements made to them. In addition to the new button group filter and dropdown filter providing more options for filtering your lists, you can now hold SHIFT and click on list rows to select multiple items in a list as a shortcut to having to click the checkbox on each record. The page number can now be directly modified to quickly switch to a specific page in the list. Finally, we've made some visual tweaks for the list functionality, including better sorting icons for sortable columns, and hiding the "select all" checkbox when there are no records in the list to select.
There's much more in our release notes for v1.2.8, so we would recommend taking a look through this list!
We hope you enjoy using the new update. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to join us on Discord. If you spot any issues, please report them on our GitHub repo where they will be promptly addressed.
If you would like to support us even more, you may also sponsor us on OpenCollective or GitHub Sponsors and give us that extra boost to bring even more cool features to Winter!
