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Contao 2.9.RC1 is available

by Leo Feyer – Announcements

Contao version 2.9.RC1 is available. The release candidate includes the new theme manager, the next version of the Extension Repository, template groups, persistent front end logins, buttons to easily share articles on Facebook and Twitter as well as plenty of other improvements, including a major Safe Mode Hack performance enhancement and an option to resume interrupted newsletter sending processes.

Important notice

There are two things that you have to manually adjust after the update. First of all, the global page template fe_page has been modified, so if you are using a custom version, make sure to change it accordingly. Second of all, we have removed Google Analytics support from the core and added a template called moo_analytics instead. If you want to use Google Analytics, edit the template and enter your Urchin ID there (follow the instructions in the file). Then add it as the last (!) MooTools template to your page layout.

Themes

Themes are a new concept to group style sheets, front end modules and page layouts and to associate them with files and templates from the files directory. The theme manager does not change the way those resources are handled, it just adds an option to export and import them without losing existing data, so you can easily share and reuse your website designs.

Learn more about the theme manager

Extension Repository 2.0

Peter Koch, the developer of the Contao Extension Repository, has reworked the repository client and server modules, adding plenty of new features such as a full-text search or an option to update multiple extensions at once. The new Extension Repository client is included in Contao 2.9.RC1.

Template groups

As you might know, you can store customized templates in the templates directory, so they will not be overwritten during an update. In the new release, you can now also store custom templates in subfolders and associate those with a particular theme. This e.g. allows you to create a global ce_text template and a different ce_text template for one of your themes, which is especially useful in multi-domain mode.

Share on Facebook and Twitter

With Contao 2.9, you can easily share content on Facebook and Twitter. Three new buttons have been added to the "print article as PDF" link, which can be enabled separately per article. The first one is a simple "print this page" button, which triggers the print function of your web browser. In conjunction with a print style sheet, you can get very impressive results here. The other two buttons provide the "share on Facebook" and "share on Twitter" functionality, which you might already be familiar with. Clicking on one of the buttons opens a new browser window, which allows you to log into your account and directly post to Facebook or Twitter. Contao automatically shortens the URL using TinyURL.

More new features

  • Pages in the front end preview are no longer loaded from the cache
  • Major Safe Mode Hack performance improvement: connect only for writing operations
  • Extended parent view: the parent view now supports sorting groups and custom sorting orders
  • A new hook called "parseArticles" allows you to modify news items before the are rendered
  • You can now load sub-palettes from a drop-down menu in addition to checkboxes (see #1156)
  • You can now optionally load the MooTools JavaScript from a content delivery network
  • You can now resume interrupted newsletter sending processes by defining a start cycle
  • You can define the maximum number of records if a user chooses the "show all" option in the back end
  • The e-mail class and the Safe Mode Hack now support SSL (SSL/TLS and FTP-SSL, not sFTP)
  • The Contao back end theme and FancyUpload can now be set per user in the personal settings
  • In addition to showing only featured items in a news list, you can now also hide them completely
  • You can now optionally display all items in a news archive if no period has been chosen

Find out what has been done

Get an overview of all changes in the ticket system or the changelog.

Download the release from github.com.

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