The Plone community is proud to announce that Volto 18 has been released along with the first Plone 6.1 Beta.
Volto is the React-based user interface for Plone 6. It will be included with the upcoming release of Plone 6.1.
New features in Plone 6.1 beta
Plone 6.1.0b1 includes the following main features:
Support and include Plone Distributions
A Plone distribution is a Python package that defines specific features, themes, add-ons, and configurations that get activated when creating a Plone site. Now it is available in core Plone as the recommended way for creating a new Plone site.
This is the main change in this first beta release compared to the last alpha.
To create your own distribution, see the Create a Plone distribution – Developer guide.
Discussions
Discussion is a feature that allows your site visitors to comment on web pages for any content object.
Discussion is a core add-on.
The code behind this is in the plone.app.discussion package. In Plone 6.0 and earlier, this was a dependency of Products.CMFPlone, making it available for installation in all Plone sites. In Plone 6.1 it's a dependency of the Plone package.
Other notable features
- Support Python 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12. Support for 3.13 is expected to be added soon. Older versions are not supported.
- plone.app.multilingual is a core add-on. plone.app.multilingual is the package that adds multilingual support to Plone, allowing the storage and display of content in multiple languages. In Plone 6.0 and earlier, this was a dependency of Products.CMFPlone, making it available for installation in all Plone sites. In Plone 6.1 it is now a dependency of the Plone package.
- TinyMCE was upgraded in Classic UI. In Plone 6.0, the Classic UI frontend uses TinyMCE 5, a rich text editor for websites. TinyMCE 5 reached its end of support on April 20, 2023. For Plone 6.1, Classic UI upgraded TinyMCE from version 5 to 7.
- Use a new content browser widget to select related items in Classic UI.
See the Plone 6.1 upgrade guide for details of these changes.
For more details on the changes compared to the last alpha release, see https://plone.org/download/releases/6.1.0b1
New features in Volto 18
Volto 18 has been developed over a year, and includes 112 new features, 240 bug fixes, and almost 100 documentation enhancements.
For editors:
Live Teaser support
Teasers are short blocks of text or an image that link to the complete target content item. A Live Teaser enhances this feature further by grabbing the current information of the target object, keeping the Live Teaser in synch with the target. This feature is enabled by default. You may opt-out of this feature to manually override the content of the teaser.
Extended object browser enhancements
The object browser lets you select objects for display in a given block. The object browser now hasan extra view for displaying image thumbnails.
New blocks layout “Order” tab
You can manage the layout and order of the blocks in a page from a new “Order” tab in the sidebar. This allows you to view a summary of the current blocks in your page. You can reorder them using drag and drop, including those “nested” blocks in blocks, such as the grid block.
Enhanced form validation
Volto forms and block settings form validation is now pluggable and you canextend them through add-ons.
URL and redirects control panel
This new control panel allows you to manage the Plone redirects from Volto.
Slots
Slots provide a way for Volto add-ons to insert their own components at predefined locations in the rendered page. This concept is inspired by the Plone Classic UI viewlets.
For developers:
Cookieplone new boilerplate generator
The new boilerplate generator Cookieplone streamlines the setup of add-ons and projects. This provides a better developer experience by unifying how you develop Volto.
Enhanced @plone/registry
This package was heavily refactored for use in environments other than Volto.
Global form state
When editing a content type, the global form state can now react to changes in it, and update other components based on the form information.
CSS properties support in the block style wrapper
The block style wrapper now supports the usage of CSS properties. These properties, once set, are injected into the tag, allowing you to style the block with them.
Upgrade to React 18
Volto 18 now uses React 18. This allows us to keep up to date with the latest developments in the React ecosystem, and be prepared for the upcoming React releases.
Demo
You can try a demo of Plone 6 with Volto 18 at https://volto.demo.plone.org/. You can also try a demo of Plone 6 with Volto 18 with a few add-ons, including Volto Light Theme, at https://demo.plone.org/.
Get started
You can install Plone and create a project to develop by visiting the Plone 6 documentation at Install Plone with Cookieplone – Admin guide — Plone Documentation v6.0.
Release notes
Contribute
To contribute to Volto, you can visit the Contributing to Volto guide.
Acknowledgments
https://github.com/plone/volto/releases/tag/18.0.0
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