Contao news

Contao version 4.1.0-beta1 is available. Please do not use beta versions for productional websites! Download the release to check whether your website or custom extension needs adaptation.

Searching for files

Both the file manager and the file picker are now searchable. However, there is a small technical limitation: unsynchronized folders cannot be included in the search results.

Removing gallery images in the preview

Single gallery images can now be removed directly in the source file preview. This only applies to specifically selected images, not to selected folders.

Save and edit

The "save and edit" button, which was only available when creating a new element so far, is now always available in the parent view. Thus you can always jump to the edit screen, even if you have directly edited a parent record.

Previewing the important part

If the important part of an image has been selected to precisely resize it, a preview of the important part is now shown in the file manager. Thus you can see at a glance whether there is an important part or not.

Field names in "edit multiple" mode

When selecting the fields to edit in "edit multiple" mode, Contao 4.1 will show the field names in addition to the field titles.

Newsletter CAPTCHA

The newsletter modules used to subscribe to or unsubscribe from a channel are now protected with a CAPTCHA (security question) in addition to the double opt-in mechanism. The security question can be disabled in the module settings.

Re-send the activation mail

If a user registered in the front end and did not receive the confirmation mail, their e-mail address could not be registered again. In Contao 4.1 it is possible to submit a second registration with the same e-mail address; in this case no new user is created but the activation mail is re-sent.

Comment moderation status

The notification mail for new comments used to include the hint "if you are moderating comments, you have to activate the comment in the back end". From now on, this hint is only included if a comment actually has to be activated in the back end.

Maintenance mode

The maintenance mode in Contao 4 is no longer enabled or disabled in the back end settings but in the maintenance module. It can additionally be enabled or disabled on the command line.

E-mail detection

The routines to detect e-mail addresses in texts and to validate e-mail-addresses have been reworked and now explicitly support Unicode characters in the local part.

Symfony secret

The Symfony secret, which is already generated automatically in the install tool, is now also generated automatically when installing via Composer.

Dbafs::addResource()

The function Dbafs::addResource() now always updates the hash of a file or folder if it already exists in the database. Please note that executing the method is expensive and should be combined with executing FilesModel::findByPath() beforehand, as far as it makes sense in the program logic.

// Expensive call
foreach ($files as $file) {
    $model = Dbafs::addResource();
}

// Better, if resources possibly exist
foreach ($files as $file) {
    $model = FilesModel::findByPath($file);
    
    if (null === $model) {
        $model = Dbafs::addResource();
    }
}

Overriding Contao resources

In Contao 4.1 it is possible to locally override files from the Resources/contao folder of a bundle by creating the respective resource with the same name in the app/Resources/contao folder.

Composer package manager

Besides the development of Contao itself, our focus is on the finalization of the Composer package manger at the moment. With Andreas Schempp and Christian Schiffler, two of the five core developers are working almost exclusively on it, therefore we are confident to release a stable first version until the end of the year.

The development of the package manager can be tracked on GitHub under tenside/core.

Installing the beta version

The beta version can only be installed via Composer.

php composer.phar create-project contao/standard-edition <target> 4.1.0-beta1

Also see: GitHub tickets | GitHub compare view | Contao changelog | Release overview