silverstripe-framework/docs/en/04_Changelogs/4.11.0.md

4.11.0 (unreleased)

Overview

• Regression test and Security audit
• Dropping support for PHP 7.3
• Features and enhancements
  • Upload and use WebP images in the CMS
  • Preview any DataObject in any admin section
  • Allow-plugins configuration option in Composer versions 2.2.0 and up
  • Other features
• Bugfixes
• Dependency and internal API changes

Regression test and Security audit

This release has been comprehensively regression tested and passed to a third party for a security-focused audit.

While it is still advised that you perform your own due diligence when upgrading your project, this work is performed to ensure a safe and secure upgrade with each recipe release.

Dropping support for PHP 7.3

In accordance with our PHP support policy, Silverstripe CMS Recipe release 4.11.0 drops support for PHP 7.3. We expect to drop support for PHP 7 altogether around January 2023.

Features and enhancements

Upload and use WebP images

WebP is an alternative image format for displaying picture on websites. It provides generally better results in most use cases to JPEG and PNG.

Read An image format for the Web for more information about WebP.

WebP has wide – but not universal – support across web browsers. Internet Explorer is the main browser that does not support WebP at this stage.

Read Can I use WebP? to see which browsers can render WebP images.

Until now, Silverstripe CMS would default to blocking content authors from uploading WebP images. Given that Internet Explorer will be end-of-life in June 2022 and that its market share are now under 1% according to most surveys, we decided the time had come to enable WebP by default in the CMS.

Once your project is upgraded to Silverstripe Recipe CMS 4.11, your content authors will automatically be able to upload WebP images and add them to web pages. We recommend you have a conversation with your users about the pros and cons of WebP so they can make an informed decisions about when to use this image format.

If your website still caters to a significant number of visitors with browsers that do not support WebP, you can disable WebP image upload by adding this snippet to your YML config:

---
Name: myproject-assetsfiletypes
After: '#assetsfiletypes'
---
SilverStripe\Assets\File:
  allowed_extensions:
    webp: false

Read Allowed file types in the Silverstripe CMS documentation for more information on how to enable or disable new image file formats.

Preview any DataObject in any admin section

The CMS preview panel has historically been available for Versioned DataObjects in the Pages admin section. This has now been expanded to allow any DataObject (regardless of whether it uses theVersioned extension) to be previewed in any section of the CMS.

This can be used to allow content authors to see the content they are creating in the context it will be presented to users. Example use cases include previewing DataObjects which belong to a page (e.g. the dnadesign/silverstripe-elemental module allows previewing elemental blocks which are not inline-editable), and previewing DataObjects in a custom admin section, such as templates for emails or system-generated PDF documents.

The Preview Documentation has been updated with code examples which show how to enable CMS preview on DataObjects in a couple of different scenarios.

Meta generator tag now shows framework version number

The meta generator tag, which can be seen in the meta tags when you view source on a regular page, now includes the framework version truncated to show just the major and minor version, e.g. 4.11.

This version number will provide aggregate installation numbers to the product team who maintain Silverstripe CMS which will be used to make informed product decisions.

If you dislike this behaviour, the entire meta generator tag can be disabled via:

SilverStripe\CMS\Model\SiteTree:
  meta_generator: ''

The version portion of the metagenerator tag can be disabled via:

SilverStripe\CMS\Model\SiteTree:
  show_meta_generator_version: false

Allow-plugins configuration option in Composer versions 2.2.0 and up

• As of Composer 2.2.0, the allow-plugins option adds a layer of security. Developers will be prompted to allow plugins when running composer install for the first time on existing projects, or for any new projects not using silverstripe/installer or silverstripe/recipe-kitchen-sink.
• The plugins needed for all silverstripe projects are: composer/installers silverstripe/recipe-plugin silverstripe/vendor-plugin New installations using silverstripe/silverstripe-installer and silverstripe/recipe-kitchen-sink from 4.11 onwards will have the above plugins added to the allowed-plugins configuration by default.
• From July 2022 composer will no longer prompt to allow plugins when running composer install. This won't affect new installs using silverstripe/installer or silverstripe-recipe-kitchen-sink, but will affect other new projects, and existing projects where allowed-plugins hasn't yet been defined. In those cases developers will need to declare the allowed plugins manually in the project's composer.json file.

Other new features

• A new AbstractGridFieldComponent class has been added to make it easier to globally add fundamental functionality to GridFieldComponents. All classes packaged with the Silverstripe framework which implement the GridFieldComponent interface are subclasses of the new abstract class, making them all Injectable. Maintainers of third-party packages which include classes that implement GridFieldComponent are encouraged to subclass the AbstractGridFieldComponent abstract class.
• New options have been added to the dnadesign/silverstripe-elemental module to control what content is indexed for searching elemental blocks. see the documentation for details.

Bugfixes

This release includes a number of bug fixes to improve a broad range of areas. Check the change logs for full details of these fixes split by module. Thank you to the community members that helped contribute these fixes as part of the release!

Dependency and internal API changes

• If guzzlehttp/guzzle is required, it must now be at least 7.3.0. This was done to ensure that v2 of guzzlehttp/psr7 is installed, which is used by embed/embed v4
• embed/embed has been upgraded from v3 to v4. The internal implementation of the internal Embeddable interface has been changed from EmbedResource to EmbedContainer
• embed/embed has been configured to use a guzzle client instead of the default curl client so that a proxy configuration value can be set if required