Two Point One! And Other News.

Jack McDade August 3rd, 2016

Oh hey, we just made a bunch of things better. It was hard work. How are you?

Today marks our first “major” feature release for Statamic 2! We rolled up our sleeves pretty high and did our best to make Statamic even more enjoyable to use, with 2.1. Let’s look at some of the highlights, the fruits of our 523 commits, shall we?

1. A Shiney New Caching Engine

This is the kind of thing that isn’t particular exciting at first glance. If we did our job well, most of you won’t even notice anything. At first.

Statamic 2.0’s content cache (called the “Stache” — which is kinda funny because wordplay) was one giant object that contained data, indexes, and lookups for all Content Types. It made sense to structure it that way to ensure it was always up to date. Except that it wasn’t very performant without other caching techniques once your site got rather large.

So we got out the scalpel and extracted numerous smaller cache objects, separate indexes, and other helpful tools from it, and married it to a brand new Eloquent-style, fluent interface to all your data.

Blah blah blah fancy words right? What does it mean? Faster sites, easier to build addons, and significantly improved internationalization. As a matter of benchmarking, sites with 2,000 Assets now load 25x faster after the initial cache warmup. Not bad.

Now in 2.1 you can now create a blog entry like this if you want:

$entry = Entry::create('hello-wilderness')
                ->with(['title' => 'Hello Wilderness!',])
                ->date('2016-08-03')
                ->save();

Good things. Lots of docs on that stuff by the way. Learn all about Data Factories. Or don’t, and buy Workshop and have it do all the work for you!

2. Control Panel Improvements

We workshopped with a handful of our users, looked at their control panels, publish screens, fieldset arrangements, and filtered all the feedback into an end-to-end UI/UX improving blitzkrieg-style sweep across the entire application.

Publish screens are more concise, more responsive, and really just more better. For the first time, we actually want to use them ourselves (we kinda like the files-only method to be honest).

Listing tables are more friendly, widgets are more useful (and plentiful), and fieldtypes look nicer, some with lighter weight empty states. All in all, we’re very happy with the changes. We won’t ever stop improving things, but this is a big step forward.

You can check out a quick video preview below!

3. OAuth

You asked, we delivered! You can now configure Statamic to use any of the Laravel Socialite providers, or make your own with, starting with the OAuth Bridge base class.

4. Inline Taxonomy Term Creation

Yeah, we’re embarrassed we didn’t ship with this, but it’s really kind of a big deal so it made this blog post. You can now create new Taxonomy Terms right inline when publishing your content.

5. Also, Other Things

There are a pile of other smaller things and bug fixes that will make you smile, chuckle, or breath out a sigh of relief. They live in the changelog, and you should read every single line because we did it all for you and it would be a little rude not to.

So go check it out! Statamic 2.1! It’s a thing. One click update yo’self.

The Aforementioned Other News

We have a new addon coming out in the next few days called Workshop. It gives you the ability to create and edit content, from Entries to Taxonomies to Globals, right on the front-end of your site. No need for Users to touch the control panel. It’s like Raven from v1, but a lot better. We were gonna call it CRUD, but that sounded messy. Workshop is classy. It’s shipping as soon as we can finish designing the product page for it. We wanted to release it at the same time but, why hold up 2.1 any longer, right?

Also, we were at Laracon last week. It was a lot of fun getting to meet some of you. I spoke. It went pretty well.