October CMS continues to quietly grow with new and useful features. The developers have added support for user-generated content, simplified the use of Vue components, and finally put an end to the story of RainLab.Translate.
We won't go into detail about every feature - instead, we'll look at the main updates and see which of them could actually be useful in our work.
User-Generated Content
Comments, feedback forms, and reviews with moderation queues, email notifications, and spam protection. All of this can now also be done through Tailor using a special blueprint type - submission.
This will probably make working with forms easier, but for now we'll keep doing them the old-fashioned way - manually.
Vue Components in Themes
The update makes it possible to add interactive elements to a website. For example, a product configurator, live search, or an interactive booking form. Previously, solutions like these required a significant amount of manual work or a complete transition of the front end to Vue.js/Nuxt.js. Now it is easier to create components and reuse them across different pages.
Theme Assets in the Database
Websites are increasingly running on “cloud” infrastructure, where servers can be replaced and scaled. Previously, images, styles, and scripts uploaded through the editor could get “stuck” on a single server. Now all of this is stored in shared cloud storage and delivered through a CDN - making it fast and consistent for all visitors, no matter where they are.
The Final Move Away From RainLab.Translate
This is the most important change for us personally. We already wrote that in version 4.2, the developers added the Translatable trait to the core and, overall, the structure of translations in the database became much better and more efficient. The same update also added quick translations to the admin panel. In version 4.3, a convenient theme translation editor was introduced. Now support for translating URLs and content files has also been completed, and the need for the RainLab.Translate plugin has finally disappeared.