A new SilverStripe is coming

We've been hard at work to get you to an alpha release of SilverStripe 4 very soon. The alpha release is a great opportunity to find out what is in store for SilverStripe 4 once it is released as stable later this year.

We’re still developing new features and working on new APIs, but here's what we’ve been working on for our first alpha release.

Complete rebuild of Files & Images section

Those of you who have used the KickAssets module are familiar with the improvements it makes to the user experience of managing files. The new AssetAdmin ("Files & Images") in SilverStripe 4 was heavily influenced by its features and design. Expect it to include most of the features of KickAssets, and a few more.

TinyMCE 4, Meet SilverStripe 4.

We're a bit late getting to the party on this one, but it sure is nice to see a massive improvement to this lynchpin of the CMS.

Files are first-class citizens

Files can be previewed and published, just like pages now, and they're protected by default.

Introducing Campaigns

Campaigns are sets of changes to one or many bodies of content that can be published all at once.

Filesystem abstraction. It's a thing.

For as long as we can all remember, files and images have been handled in a singular way in SilverStripe. We have a table in the database that reflects the metadata of files in a public folder of the web server. This has worked great for a long time, but it doesn't scale well, and when you want to use cloud storage or a CDN, implementation can be tedious, if not hacky.

In SilverStripe 4, we're deprecating the old $has_one relationships to File and creating the AssetContainer interface, which allows you to store file references in the native $db array. These file references are agnostic to where the files actually live, and makes their retrieval and/or processing a simple implementation detail. The traditional approach of using the File table will now become a database fieldtype known as DBFile. Expect to see more options coming down the track, for instance S3File. Further, assets are persisted using the acclaimed Flysystem package.

Brace yourselves. Alpha is coming.

Keep your eyes open in the coming weeks when we'll deliver an alpha release for you. The announcement will be made on our blog, so click the Subscribe button below to go into our blog list and be the first to know!