Apostrophe 4.12.0: Apollo theme for Astro, Nestable menus for Palette, and Improved Import-Export Features

[BoDonkey]

Greetings Apostrophe Universe!

As we step into 2025, we're reminded that the best journeys often begin with a choice. In the spirit of new beginnings, this release continues our commitment to making ApostropheCMS more flexible and adaptable to your preferred development paths and customization needs.

The past year has seen us steadily expanding the ways you can build with Apostrophe - from our shift to Vite enabling easier integration of various frontend frameworks, to adding a route on our roadmap for more diverse templating approaches. Today, we're excited to showcase Apollo, our new Astro theme, which exemplifies this philosophy of choice. It's more than just a theme - it's a demonstration of how Apostrophe can harmonize with modern frameworks while maintaining the robust content management capabilities you rely on.

apostrophe-release-4.12.0.mp4

Introducing Apollo: Where Apostrophe Meets Astro

After the successful launch of our apostrophe-astro extension last year, we're thrilled to present Apollo - a full-featured theme that showcases the seamless integration between ApostropheCMS and Astro. While our initial starter kit demonstrated the basics, Apollo expands the possibilities significantly, implementing a comprehensive set of widgets that leverage the best of both platforms.

What makes this integration special is how it preserves the essence of both systems. Content managers get to keep everything they love about Apostrophe - the intuitive UI, in-context editing, and robust workflow tools - while developers can harness Astro's powerful templating and routing capabilities without writing complex data fetching logic. The schemas you create in Apostrophe, whether for widgets, pages, or pieces, automatically become available in your Astro templates.

We envision Apollo as both a production-ready theme and an inspiration for the community. Each component demonstrates our best practices for bridging these platforms, and we hope it serves as a foundation for developers to build and share their own themes and widgets. We're looking forward to seeing how you adapt and extend Apollo for your own needs.

Ready to get started? You can clone the Apollo repository on GitHub, follow the setup instructions, and start building your next project. We are eager for feedback on how to further improve the integration between these two platforms, and make it easier to onboard your projects!

Apostrophe Palette: Nest-able menus and UI updates

The @apostrophecms-pro/palette extension provides a great way to customize the CSS on your site and now the UI is even better. Based on feedback from our community, the grouping and presentation of styling groups have been significantly streamlined. You can now nest submenus to any depth, making it easier to break up large configurations. Additionally, now you can use CSS variables both in Palette and the standard color picker field. The options of the color picker have been revamped to simplify and expand your choices. Check out the documentation for more!

Enhanced Import/Export Capabilities

We made several significant improvements to the @apostrophecms/import-export extension for this release. Pages linked through the "Internal Page" option in rich text editors can now be exported as related documents, along with images embedded inline in rich text widgets. These enhancements make it easier to maintain content relationships when transferring content between environments. The export modal interface has also been refined with improved animations and better handling of related content types.

Whether you're building with Apollo and Astro, customizing your site with Palette, or managing content with our enhanced import/export tools, Apostrophe 4.12.0 gives you the power to choose your path. Get started with a simple npm update and show us what you'll build next!

Apostrophe 4.12.0

Fixes

• Fixes ability to change color hue by clicking the color hue bar rather than dragging the indicator.
• Prevents the rich text control bar from closing while using certain UI within the color picker.
• Saving a document via the dialog box properly refreshes the main content area when on a "show page" (when the context document is a piece rather than a page)
• Fixes the AposButtonSplit markup to follow the HTML5 specification, optimizes the component performance, visuals and testability.
• Fixes a case where releationship button overlaps a context menu.

Adds

• Ability to disable the color spectrum UI of a color picker
• Accessibility improvement for the rich text editor Typography toolbar item.
• Adds moduleLabels prop to AposDocContextMenu to pass it to opened modals from custom operations (used by templates to define labels to display on the export modal).

Changes

• Range style updates.
• The pickerOptions sub property of a color field's configuration has been merged with it's parent options object.
• Reworks inline and micro UI of some fields (color, range, select). Improve global inline style.
• Makes the range input being a number all the time instead of a string that we convert manually.

Pro modules

@apostrophecms-pro/cypress-tools 1.0.0-beta.17

Automated functional browser tests are an important part of quality assurance for enterprise websites and web applications. Cypress is an industry-standard, open-source library for carrying out automated functional browser tests. This module provides a collection of conveniences for testing ApostropheCMS sites and applications within Cypress. Contact us or visit our new pricing page to learn more.

Adds

• Support ESM imports.
• Type definition can now be referenced with @apostrophecms/cypress-tools (without the trailing /global).

Changes

• Change selectors for selectPrimaryAction command, related with Apostrophe core changes.
• Improve the scope of the selectPrimaryAction command assertion.

@apostrophecms-pro/doc-template-library 2.2.4

This module solves the "blank page problem" for developers and product managers, and makes it faster for editors to create content. doc-template-library allows for the configuration of default widgets and pre-populated content on piece or page templates, and to re-use existing layouts. Explore our documentation to discover how this extension can enhance your project. Then, effortlessly integrate it through our new Apostrophe Workspaces. For further details or inquiries, feel free to contact us or visit our pricing page.

Adds

• Adds translations for the new English translation strings to the core languages.

Fixes

• Computes a more accurate module labels containing the current type with Template suffix. Uses it for the cancel modal and export one in editor modal. Computes checkedTypes for batch export modal.

@apostrophecms-pro/palette 4.5.0

An in-context interface for changing CSS. @apostrophecms-pro/palette is a module that provides an in-context interface for changing the values of developer-set CSS properties. The values are stored in an Apostrophe piece singleton (like @apostrophecms/global) and applied to the site whenever the stylesheet link is included in a template. Adjusting values via the palette interface renders changes to the site instantly. Explore our documentation to discover how this extension can enhance your project. Then, effortlessly integrate it through our new Apostrophe Workspaces. For further details or inquiries, feel free to contact us or visit our pricing page.

Changes

• Rework palette UI (phase 2): New slide navigation system, use of new micro fields UIs, new inline group support.

Apostrophe modules

@apostrophecms/import-export 2.6.0

This module enables import and export of pages and pieces, with or without related documents such as files, images and other related types.

Adds

• Pages linked a page via the "Internal Page" option in the rich text editor are now candidates to be exported as related documents.
• Images embedded inline in rich text widgets via the insert: [ 'image' ] option are now candidates to be exported as related documents.
• Uses moduleLabels prop when available.

Fixes

• Fixes Export modal related types slide animation. Uses checkedTypes when passed from parent component.

Utilities

@apostrophecms/apostrophe-astro 1.2.0

This module integrates ApostropheCMS into your Astro application.

Changes

• The configuration array for headers passed from Apostrophe to the browser has been changed from forwardHeaders to includeResponseHeaders with BC maintained.
• A new configuration option excludeRequestHeaders has been added to allow exclusion of headers like host being sent from the browser to Apostrophe.
• The README.MD has been updated with the new configuration options.
• Clearer error messages have been added to indicate that either the backend server has not been started, or that the APOS_EXTERNAL_FRONT_KEY strings don't match.

@apostrophecms/cli 3.5.0 (2025-03-12)

The Apostrophe CLI is a cross-platform starting point for creating and configuring ApostropheCMS projects, providing a simple boilerplate generator and wrapping other useful functions into an easy to use command line tool.

Adds

• add widget, add piece and add module are compatible with our new ESM-based starter kits. commonjs starter kits can still be used.

@apostrophecms/minuscule 1.0.0

A tiny Express wrapper for safe, rapid microservice development

minuscule seeks to allow developers to write API routes more safely, with less cognitive load and less chance of accidental bugs.

Adds

• initial release

@apostrophecms/stylelint-config-apostrophe 4.2.2

This module provides a stylelint configuration for the Apostrophe team and contributors.

Changed

• Revert the removal of the scale-unlimited/declaration-strict-value rule that was added in 4.2.1. The deprecation warning has been resolved in v1.10.7 of the plugin.