Neos and Flow 8.1 "Frog–Footman" Release

Welcome Neos and Flow 8.1 "Frog-Footman" to the release family!

– Written by


Frog-Footman

The Frog-Footman appears in chapter six of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

He serves at the house of the Duchess.

It matches this release, as it's a rather humble evolution of the previous one, hopefully serving all Neos and Flow users out there well…

Frog-Footman and Fish-Footman
Frog-Footman and Fish-Footman.
John Tenniel`s original (1865) illustration for Lewis Carroll`s "Alice in Wonderland".

Release Highlights

Neos

Refresh the raw content mode

The raw content mode is implemented freshly and now only relies on the NodeType-configuration for rendering and not requiring a Fusion integration. By default the raw mode will render all inline editable properties, previews of Images and all childnodes.

The Neos backend will now default to the raw content mode as last resort if no other document rendering is possible. In the frontend a last try to render via the document type is done to create at least helpful error message that encourages good practices.

The whole feature is a building block to eventually allow content first workflows where no Fusion rendering has to be defined to edit content.

Introduce Neos.Fusion:ActionUri as replacement for Neos.Fusion:UriBuilder

The name Neos.Fusion:UriBuilder stands out from other Fusion prototypes because it describes what the prototype does instead of what will be the result. This contradicts the declarative nature of Fusion. In addition it is not possible to render links from a subrequests to other main-requests without manipulating the controller-context. A common case for that are Fusion-backend modules that want to render links to the content or other modules.

This change adds the prototype Neos.Fusion:ActionUri as a 1:1 replacement that implements the same api but allows to configure the request the uri is to be built from. This allows to create links from subrequests into other contexts.

Implement choice to sort properties for array objects

The new meta property @sortProperties can now be used to define if properties should adhere to the @sorting meta and general order of definition or if that is irrelevant.

Sorting itself is time-consuming, and while that does not matter for a single sort, a bigger site might have so many Fusion objects to render that the sorting can have massive influence on the render performance. Therefore it’s advisable to disable it whenever possible.

Specifically Neos.Fusion:Component as well as attributes in Neos.Fusion:Tag are now unsorted. Also HTTP headers are unsorted.

Allow sorting in user management backend module

If you go to the User Management Backend Module: Administration -> User Management, it’s now possible to sort by the Name, the Accounts, and the last login by clicking on the specific header.

Flow

Typed environment variable replacements in Settings

With this change, the type of environment variables can be specified in Configuration files:

someSetting: '%env(int):SOME_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE%'

This will cast the corresponding value to the specified type (and to the base value of the type when referring to undefined environment variables). This way it is possible to have integer or boolean values come from environment variables (which are always strings for technical reasons.)

Support for object serialization without var annotation

This introduces support for PHP 7.4 style class property type declarations for objects to be serialized by Flow. Previously, a @var annotation had to be specified for each class property, in order to communicate the type to Flow’s serialization mechanism.


Documentation and Support

Upgrading

The detailed upgrading process for Neos 8.1 is explained in the upgrade instructions and Release Notes.

For Flow related upgrade instructions, please refer to the Flow 8.1 Release Notes.

Changelogs

See the Neos 8.1, Neos UI 8.1 and Flow 8.1 change logs for all changes and further details.

Support for Neos 8.1 and Flow 8.1

As shown in our release roadmap, Neos 8.1 and Flow 8.1 will get bug fixes until December 2023 and security fixes until December 2024.


Thank you!

Thanks to all core team members and the community for your valuable contributions and sponsorships. Especially during this difficult time in which a lot of people have many private topics on their mind and less time to contribute.

Also, a big thank you to the families of all the team members, that allow them to still put all of this effort into the project!

Take care of everyone and stay healthy ❤️