Apostrophe 3.56.0: npm workspaces support, page render changes, and rich-text-widget updates

[BoDonkey]

Howdy from Apostrophe Central!

This cycle brought some small, but mighty, changes to Apostrophe core. The biggest change is that you can now use the npm workspaces feature with your projects. While optional, this brings multiple advantages including easier dependency management, potentially reduced disk space, and greater consistency in your development and production environments.

While the full implementation of headless contextual editing is still a bit farther down the product roadmap, page rendering using templating engines other than Nunjucks just got a little easier. For brave souls who want to roll their own SSR (Server-Side Rendering) with React or another frontend framework, the primary method for sending rendered HTML in response to a request has been factored out for easy overrides. See the changelog below for more details.

The rich-text-widget got two new tasks to ease cleanup from early versions of our support for inline images in the rich text editor. In some cases, rich text content could be malformed, containing extra paragraph tags, or incorrect placement of figure text. These tasks help you correct this more quickly. Additionally, the widget has been improved, allowing configuration options for custom Tiptap extensions on a per-area basis. Stay tuned for a tutorial on creating your own rich-text-widget extensions that use this feature!

Since our last note we also had an off-cycle hotfix release. This hotfix improved the output of the Apostrophe structured logging to provide additional information that was previously obscured in some cases.

Remember, npm update gets you the latest and greatest right in your project!

This next cycle should see the release of the new import/export module to allow the transfer of completely intact documents between sites. As always, we love to get feedback on past or future features in our Discord server and on our Product Roadmap.

Apostrophe 3.56.0

Adds

• Add ability for custom tiptap extensions to access the options passed to rich text widgets at the area level.
• Add support for npm workspaces dependencies. A workspace dependency can now be used as an Apostrophe module even if it is not a direct dependency of the Apostrophe project. Only direct workspaces dependencies of the Apostrophe project are supported, meaning this will only work with workspaces set in the Apostrophe project. Workspaces set in npm modules are not supported, please use bundle instead. For instance, I have an Apostrophe project called website. website is set with two npm workspaces, workspace-a & workspace-b. workspace-a package.json contains a module named blog as a dependency. website can reference blog as enabled in the Apostrophe modules configuration.
• The actual invocation of renderPageForModule by the sendPage method of all modules has been
  factored out to renderPage, which is no longer deprecated. This provides a convenient override point
  for those who wish to substitute something else for Nunjucks or just wrap the HTML in a larger data
  structure. For consistent results, one might also choose to override the renderWidget and render
  methods of the @apostrophecms/area module, which are used to render content while editing.
  Thanks to Michelin for their support of this work.
• Add @apostrophecms/rich-text-widget:lint-fix-figure task to wrap text nodes in paragraph tags when next to figure tags. Figure tags are not valid children of paragraph tags.
• Add @apostrophecms/rich-text-widget:remove-empty-paragraph task to remove empty paragraphs from all existing rich-texts.

Hotfix 3.55.1 (2023-09-11)

Fixes

• The structured logging for API routes now responds properly if an API route throws a string as an exception, rather than
  a politely Error-derived object with a stack property. Previously this resulted in an error message about the logging
  system itself, which was not useful for debugging the original exception.

Pro modules

@apostrophecms-pro/advanced-permission 1.6.3

This module provides more granular control over content permission. It allows the creation of custom groups with proscribed abilities and the ability to assign users to as few or as many groups as desired. Users and groups can also be assigned per-document and per-locale permissions allowing for fine control of who can edit and publish any document. Contact us or visit our new pricing page to learn more.

Adds

• Add importExport options to prevent groups from being imported and exported by a forthcoming module.