Publii CMS v0.47: Introducing the Notification Center, Many Fixes and Improvements

Welcome back after the summer break! We're excited to announce the release of Publii CMS v0.47. This latest update is primarily focused on introducing a long-awaited feature: the Notification Center. Alongside this new addition, this version also includes a significant number of patches and improvements, addressing many of the bugs and suggestions reported by our community.

The Notification Center: A Central Hub for All Publii Updates

Staying on top of the latest updates for Publii, its themes, and plugins is now easier than ever with the introduction of the much-requested Notification Center. This new feature provides a centralized hub for all important communications, ensuring you're always in the loop.

The Center is organized into clear sections, displaying several types of alerts:

• Application Updates: Be the first to know when a new version of Publii is available.
• Theme & Plugin Updates: Get notifications for your installed themes and plugins.
• News & Announcements: Occasionally, we may send special messages or news from the Publii blog directly to the app.

Each update notification provides all the necessary details at a glance, including your current version, the new version number or a link to view update details. Crucially, it also contains a direct link to the Publii site to download the new package. This puts you firmly in control; you decide if and when you want to update.

To make notifications more relevant, they can be targeted to specific platforms. For instance, if we release a hotfix that only applies to the Windows version of Publii, only Windows users will be alerted.

We also understand that you may not want to act on an update immediately. If a notification alert becomes distracting, you can simply mark it as read. This will dismiss the prompt, but the information will remain available in the Notification Center for you to review later. Furthermore, you can delete notifications at any time, or if you prefer, you can disable the feature entirely in the application settings by withdrawing your consent.

Additional Features & Enhancements

In this release, we've also included several smaller, but highly useful, features that will definitely improve your day-to-day experience with Publii. These include:

New Link Options in Editors

We've enhanced link management across Publii's editors to give you more styling and accessibility control. In the standard WYSIWYG editor, you can now directly specify a CSS class for your links. This is perfect for applying custom styles, like creating buttons or visually distinct links, without leaving the editor.

The Block Editor receives an even bigger upgrade. In addition to assigning a CSS class, you can now also define the title attribute for your links. This addition is excellent for improving your site's accessibility and providing extra context to your visitors.

File Manager in the Sidebar

For users who frequently work with files, we're testing a new workflow enhancement that brings the File Manager right to your fingertips. This provides instant, one-click access, saving you a few steps every time you need to manage your site's files.

To try it out, click the three-dots menu in the top-right corner and select App Settings from the dropdown. In the window that appears, scroll to the bottom to find the Experimental Features section, where you can enable this option.

Note: As this is an experimental feature, its behavior or placement may change in future updates based on community feedback. 

Finally, this update also bundles in several other handy improvements:

• Small Upload in Repeater: For theme and plugin developers, we've added support for the smallupload control within the Repeater field. Previously, only the large image uploader was available. Now, for more compact layouts, you can use the much smaller upload UI.

• Custom S3 Cache-Control Headers: Based on valuable community feedback (ref, GitHub), we’ve added more control over HTTP headers for S3-compatible deployments. Previously, Publii could set a restrictive Cache-Control: no-cache header on HTML files, which prevented some third-party CDNs from caching pages and impacting performance. You can now define custom cache-control headers directly in the S3 deployment settings. This provides greater flexibility and ensures better compatibility with a wider range of storage providers and CDN configurations.

• New Global Variable: A new global variable, @website.description, has been added. Theme developers can now easily output the site's internal description (from the Site Settings) anywhere in their theme files.

Improvements

We've made several improvements to enhance user experience and website functionality:

• Added a more descriptive error message that appears when a theme's JSON configuration file is invalid, making it easier to diagnose theme-related issues.
• The list of available AWS regions for S3 deployment has been updated to include the latest additions.
• To improve stability on Linux systems, the 'sharp' image processing library has been limited to a single thread to prevent potential memory-related issues during image generation.
• We have updated several core dependencies, including the Electron framework that Publii is built on. This brings the latest security patches, performance improvements, and bug fixes from the underlying technologies.

Bug Fixes

We've also addressed several bugs to improve stability and performance:

• Fixed a critical rendering issue related to file descriptors that could occur on sites with a very large number of files. (ref. GitHub Issue)
• Corrected an issue where links to Tags pages could be generated incorrectly in certain scenarios.
• Resolved a bug that caused incorrect og:url meta tags to be generated for nested pages, which could impact social media sharing. (ref. GitHub Discussion)
• Addressed a problem where custom author avatars were not being saved correctly. (ref. GitHub Issue)
• Fixed an issue that could occur when converting multiple posts to pages in bulk.
• Corrected the format of local file paths used in the preview server to resolve potential asset loading issues. (ref. GitHub Issue)
• Fixed a minor issue with an incorrect label in the SEO settings section. (ref. GitHub Issue)

Final Thoughts

The release of Publii v0.47 reinforces our commitment to building a more intuitive and powerful platform, guided directly by the needs of our users. The new Notification Center is a major step towards better communication, while the host of enhancements and community-reported fixes demonstrates our ongoing dedication to quality and stability. Every update aims to refine your workflow and make managing your website a more seamless experience.

Publii's evolution is a collaborative process, and your voice is the most critical part of it. We invite you to continue sharing your ideas, suggestions, and bug reports on our community forum. Your active participation is what pushes the project forward.

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