The blog has been a bit quieter than normal lately, but that's only because we've been busy working on a new Grav release that contains a plethora of goodies, a variety of user requested improvements, an assortment of bug fixes, as well as a smattering of important security enhancements.

After nearly 3 months of development and testing, we are proud to release Grav v1.3 along with Admin plugin v1.5.

We have released 5 Release Candidates of Grav under the GPM Testing option and it is now ready for wide-spread general release. Grav 1.3 is an incremental release that adds some new features and capabilities while maintaining compatibility with the previous version. Some of the new capabilities, improvements and fixes in this release include:

Grav 1.3 Features (since Grav 1.2.4)

• Single array field - ability for an entire form to be a single field (like a List field)
• Added 165 new thumbnails - These images are used with various media types
• Core EXIF support - with the ability to automatically generate Page Media metafiles
• New Pages helper functions - Pages::baseUrl(), Pages::homeUrl(), Pages::url()
• New Twig filters - exif, base32_encode, base32_decode, base64_encode, base64_decode, lower, upper
• New Twig functions - media_directory, vardump, pathinfo
• Custom output providers - Allow for better integration with other frameworks
• New Collection classes - New powerful collection capabilities
• Improved hash file-check - The reliability and performance of this cache check method has been improved
• Improved Windows routing with built-in webserver - You are now able to use the admin plugin with PHP's built-in webserver on Windows machines
• Fixed REGEX redirects/routes - This is an important bug that caused pattern matching redirects to not function
• Various security fixes - Addressed some issues with XSS exploit mechanisms
• Assorted bug fixes and improvements - Lots of other minor bug fixes and improvements in this release.

Admin Plugin 1.5 Features (since Admin 1.4.2)

• New mediapicker field - Let's you pick media from any page location
• New multilevel field - Experimental field for defining collections definitions, metadata and other complex YAML data
• EXIF Viewer - avaiable on image in the page media field
• Prev/Next page navigation - Easily move among sibling pages with these new toolbar buttons
• Improved full-screen editing - Now with improved browser compatibility
• More admin plugin configuration options - Such as controlling how preview opens
• Improved Stats UX - Now displays month + date
• Improved file field - This field now renders preview on load
• Sidebar badge and security support - For 3rd party admin plugins
• Various security fixes - Addressed some issues with XSS exploit mechanisms
• Assorted bug fixes and improvements - Lots of other minor bug fixes and improvements in this release

Upgrading

Upgrading to Grav v1.3 is an absolute doddle! If you already have the Admin plugin installed, you simple click the Update Grav Now button to upgrade Grav Core itself, and then the Update button in the Maintenance section (or individually in the Plugins and Themes sections) to upgrade all Plugins and Themes.

If you don't have the Admin plugin installed, you can use Grav's built-in package manager to update to the latest version of the Grav Core:

$ bin/gpm self-upgrade

This will download the 'update' package and install it automatically. After this you should also check for any updates to Plugins and Themes and install those as required:

$ bin/gpm update