Refinery CMS 5.0 sneak peek
We have been working on Refinery CMS 5.0 for a couple of months and think it's the time to show you some of the new exciting features for this next major release:
- Rails 5.2 support
- Mobility gem for translations
- Image crop feature
- Selenium Google Chrome Driver
- New Admin UI
For your information, we are already using all these new features on a website in production. If you want to test this future release, you could use the master branch of the GitHub repository like this:
# Gemfile gem 'refinerycms', git: 'https://github.com/refinery/refinerycms', branch: 'master'
Rails 5.2 support
This new release is already supporting Rails 5.2.
FYI, the 4.0 branch of Refinery CMS was supporting Rails 5.1.
Mobility gem for translations
While we have had great benefit from it for many years, we have made the choice to stop using Globalize for Refinery CMS 5.0. We are now using the excellent Mobility gem created by Chris Salzberg, one of the biggest contributors to Globalize. It really fits our needs for translation features, and its design is future proof and does not rely on ActiveRecord or Rails which will reduce our maintenance burden considerably.
Image crop feature
One of most unexpected features for this release but also one the coolest: we are now able to create cropped images directly in the images admin. All crops can be added in the content by using the WYSIWYG or the image picker.
Selenium Google Chrome Driver
Before we were using PhantomJS, but its development is now suspended since March 2018. We made the switch to use Selenium with the Google Chrome Driver. With this change, we will expect a better support of ES6 features when we will be ready to refactor our Javascript and run our continuous integration builds.
New Admin UI
Overall product quality judged only by how it looks? It could be true in a lot of situations.
So we decided to refactor the current stylesheet to give Refinery CMS a fresh look. This changes won't need extra work on current Refinery CMS extensions.
This feature is the last mandatory feature to finish, review, and merge before releasing Refinery CMS 5.0.
What else?
Not mandatory for this next major release but the GraphQL API feature is the path for the future of Refinery CMS.
We will also continue to fix and merge all issues and pull requests that will improve the current feature set of Refinery CMS.
Expected release date
It's always hard to tell in an open source software reality but we will release 5.0 when the new admin UI will be merged. So expect a release by Autumn 2018.
Want to contribute?
Contributions and contributors are always welcome! If you want to help us, don't hesitate to speak with us on our Gitter channel or, as usual, open a pull request on GitHub.