Volto 7.8.0 released with CMS-UI functionality!

Development Plone 6 UI (Volto)
1

Volto 7.8.0 has been released:

Nicola, Piero and Guilia from RedTurtle de-coupled the CMS user interface from the Volto theme to allow using Volto with different CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap.

This concept might sound familiar. We tried something similar for classic Plone with CMS-UI long time ago.

Volto changelog: https://github.com/plone/volto/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

You can find the documentation about how to use Volto with a different CMS framework here:

https://docs.voltocms.com/theming/using-third-party-themes/

2 Likes
2

Glad to see this in volto but not sure what you mean by "tried a long time ago". It's been in core plone in the classic UI for 5 years and is still there in 5.2.
All our production themes use it. I know others do. It's extremely useful in bring down the cost of theming when you are given a theme rather than developing your own.

3

"Tried" was referring to the iframe-option we discussed some time ago. At some point, I stopped following the discussion we had, so I wasn't sure how far we actually got.

4

@tisto There are two ideas.

  1. One is to give the themer the mecahnism to have two themes. One for CMSUI and one for public pages. And the public pages theme would only have to include the barest minimum CSS/JS to get the toolbar visible and nothing else. The toolbar was built to use very little specific CSS anyway.
  2. take this further and put the toolbar into an iframe so there is no need for even the minimal CSS being included in the public theme.

Option 1 was implemented by me and is in the core. Option 2 was tried by Rok but he gave up. Mainly because we was trying to do even more which is create all the CMSUI as popups originating from inside the toolbar iframe. Which wasn't really needed in practice. It's not that bad just reloading the page on a toolbar click.

I had assumed the new volto theme separation feature was more like option 1 but are you saying iframes are used so the toolbar shown on public pages is completely isolated from the public theme and no inclusion of any min js or css is required in the public theme? If so thats great. It will reduce the cost of theming enormously.

5

We do not use iframes to completely decouple the CMS UI from the rest of the styles. We separated our CSS/LESS so that you can create a minimal theme that just contains the styles for the CMS UI and nothing more.

6

Not sure why you need both methods of separation but great.