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

title
4.11.0 (unreleased)

4.11.0 (unreleased)

Overview

• Regression test and Security audit
• Adding support for PHP 8.1
• Dropping support for PHP 7.3
• GraphQL v4 major release
• Features and enhancements
  • Upload and use WebP images in the CMS
  • Preview any DataObject in any admin section
  • Meta generator tag now shows framework version number
  • Allow-plugins configuration option in Composer versions 2.2.0 and up
  • Users will recieve an email if their password is changed
  • 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.

Adding support for PHP 8.1

The Silverstripe CMS recipe now officially supports PHP 8.1. This version of PHP introduced various deprecation warnings, most notably when passing null arguments to many native PHP functions. Silverstripe CMS now makes liberal use of the null coalescing operator when calling native PHP functions to convert null arguments to scalars. Other changes including adding the __serialize and __unserialize methods to classes implementing the Serializable interface and adding the [#\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute to methods on classes implementing various PHP interfaces such as Iterator.

Dropping support for PHP 7.3

In accordance with our PHP support policy, Silverstripe CMS Recipe 4.11.0 drops support for PHP 7.3.

GraphQL 4 major release

Silverstripe CMS Recipe 4.11.0 defaults to installing silverstripe/graphql version 4, which has just had a stable release. Previous releases installed version 3.

What does silverstripe/graphql do and why are you changing this?

GraphQL is a query language for APIs. It was initially designed by Facebook but it is now used widely across the internet by all sorts of organisations including GitHub, AirBnB, Lyft, PayPal, Shopify, and Silverstripe CMS – to name just a few.

silverstripe/graphql is an implementation of GraphQL specific to Silverstripe CMS. It is used to power some aspects of the CMS UI. It can also be used by developers to create APIs that other web services can use to read or update data in your Silverstripe sites. This opens a lot of use cases like using Silverstripe CMS as a “headless” CMS.

Up until CMS Recipe 4.11.0, Silverstripe CMS would default to using silverstripe/graphql version 3. While silverstripe/graphql v3 was sufficient to support the basic CMS use cases it was being used for, it was not performant enough to build more complex applications.

silverstripe/graphql v4 is a complete rewrite and provides substantial performance improvements. It provides developers a first class tool for building APIs and allowing third party services to integrate with their Silverstripe CMS websites.

What do I need to know to get started?

Part of the reason why silverstripe/graphql v4 is so much faster than v3 is that it has a “code generation” step. Silverstripe CMS will generate PHP classes for your GraphQL schemas which are then used to respond to queries or perform mutations. Previously the schema configuration had to be interpreted for every GraphQL request.

If you do not have a custom schema, all you need to know is:

• There are two new folders that your web server user will need write access to: .graphql-generated and public/_graphql. These are mentioned in the Server Requirements documentation.
  • If these folders do not exist when silverstripe/graphql needs them, the module will try to create them.
• The GraphQL schema for the CMS will need to be generated. For the most common hosting scenarios you will be fine letting this happen during dev/build, but read the building the schema documentation to know what your options are – especially if you have a multi-server hosting solution.
• You will need to deploy the generated schema to your test and production environments. There are several ways to do this depending on your hosting situation – see the deploying the schema documentation for details.

If you were already using silverstripe/graphql v3 for your own custom schema and queries and want to upgrade to v4, you will also need to read the Upgrading to GraphQL 4 documentation, and are encouraged to read the GraphQL documentation in general to make sure your existing knowledge carries over to the new major release.

That sounds risky, do I absolutely have to use version 4?

Silverstripe CMS has been shipping with dual support for silverstripe/graphql v3 and v4 since the 4.8 release. Until now silverstripe/graphql v4 had been in alpha and you had to explicitly opt-in to get it. At Silverstripe, we are already using silverstripe/graphql v4 in production on several projects.

All the supported Silverstripe CMS modules that use silverstripe/graphql have dual-support. If you wish to stay on silverstripe/graphql v3, you can do so and it will not block you from upgrading to Silverstripe CMS 4.11.

Opting out of silverstripe/graphql version 4 and sticking to version 3

If your project composer.json file already explicitly requires silverstripe/graphql version 3, you don’t need to do anything.

If your project uses silverstripe/recipe-cms, it will install silverstripe/graphql:^4.0 when you upgrade to the 4.11.0 release if you don't have the graphql module listed as an explicit dependency. To stay on silverstripe/graphql:^3, you'll need to explicitly declare this dependency and tell composer to downgrade it's dependencies.

You may also see silverstripe/graphql version 4 being installed even if your project does not directly require silverstripe/recipe-cms or silverstripe/graphql if you require other modules that depend on it.

To downgrade silverstripe/graphql to version 3, run this composer command:

composer require silverstripe/graphql:^3 --with-all-dependencies

To validate which version of silverstripe/graphql your project is using, run this composer command:

composer show silverstripe/graphql

To view which dependencies require silverstripe/graphql, run this composer command:

composer why silverstripe/graphql

Tracking or ignoring the .graphql-generated and public/_graphql folders

Existing projects will not have an entry in their .gitignore file for .graphql-generated or public/_graphql. It is best practice for most situations to not track these folders in version control. You’ll have to manually add these entries to your .gitignore file.

The .gitignore file in silverstripe/installer 4.11.0 has been updated to ignore both of these folders. If you start a new project from silverstripe/installer 4.11.0 and want to track the new folders, you’ll have to remove those entries from your .gitignore file.

Features and enhancements

Upload and use WebP images

WebP is an image format which is optimised for displaying pictures on websites. It provides generally better results in most use cases to JPEG and PNG. It 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 went out of support on June 15 2022, and that its market share is now under 1% according to most surveys, we decided the time had come to allow WebP uploads by default in the CMS.

Once your project is upgraded to Silverstripe Recipe CMS 4.11.0, 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 uploads by adding this snippet to your YAML config:

---
Name: project-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.

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

Preview any DataObject in any admin section

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

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

The CMS preview documentation has been updated with code examples which show how to enable CMS preview for DataObject classes 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 allow the product team who maintains Silverstripe CMS to make informed product decisions based on aggregate installation numbers.

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

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

You can also disable just the version portion of the metagenerator tag:

SilverStripe\CMS\Model\SiteTree:
  show_meta_generator_version: false

Allow-plugins configuration in Composer versions 2.2.0 and up

Composer 2.2.0 introduced a new allow-plugins configuration for composer.json. Developers will be prompted to allow plugins when running composer install for the first time on existing Silverstripe projects, or for any new Silverstripe projects not using silverstripe/installer.

The plugins which should be allowed for all Silverstripe projects are:

• composer/installers
• silverstripe/vendor-plugin
• silverstripe/recipe-plugin (if your project uses a Silverstripe recipe)

New projects using silverstripe/silverstripe-installer from 4.11.0 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 (specifically, the Composer documentation states "the default will become {} and plugins will not load anymore unless allowed"). This won't affect new projects using silverstripe/installer, 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.

Users will receive an email if their password is changed

The SilverStripe\Security\Member.notify_password_change configuration has been set to true by default – it used to be false. This means when a user changes their password on a project in "live" mode, they will recieve an email alerting them that their password was changed. The email includes a link to change their password again, so that users can recover their account in the event that someone else changed their password without their knowledge.

This change was made to improve the default security of your projects, but if you do not want this behaviour you can disable it by setting the configuration back to false:

SilverStripe\Security\Member:
  notify_password_change: false

[info] Note that this configuration is already enabled by default in the cwp/cwp-core module. Projects which have that as a dependency won't experience any change in behaviour. [/info]

The email content can also be changed in a couple of ways:

• Override the SilverStripe\Control\Email\ChangePasswordEmail template.
• Create an Extension for Member that implements the updateChangedPasswordEmail(Email $email) method.

Other new features

• A new AbstractGridFieldComponent class has been added to make it easier to globally add fundamental functionality to GridField components. 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 new 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.

• Multiple backticked environment variables can be included in a single injected property via YAML configuration. See Using environment variables in config for details.

• Individual fields in the $searchable_fields configuration can be used to search across multiple database fields. See Searchable Fields for details.

• A new RelationValidationService has been added. If enabled, when you run dev/build it will check that the relations on your DataObjects are set correctly according to the principles in the Relations between Records documentation. See many_many to see how to enable it.

• In ReportAdmin, the count of items per report is now capped at 10,000 to avoid timing out when loading the list of reports. This number is configurable – see Counts in ReportAdmin for details.

• Using the silverstripe/session-manager module, administrators are now able to globally revoke active sessions for all users. This is done using the InvalidateAllSessions build task. See the module's readme 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

• The embed/embed dependency 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
• If you have guzzlehttp/guzzle as a dependency in your project, it must now be at least 7.3.0. This is to ensure that v2 of guzzlehttp/psr7 is installed, which is used by embed/embed v4