As I previously outlined in the Grav Version 1.1 Coming Soon blog post, there are many great improvements under the covers of the upcoming Grav 1.1 version. We now need your help to test these new features and functionality to ensure they are all working as intended and perform as advertised.

We have now released the first beta versions of Grav 1.1 as well as beta versions of Admin, Form, and Login plugins. These are all available in a single downloadable package located on the download page.

Download Grav Beta Now

The intention with this beta testing phase, is to iron out any issues that have cropped up from our refactoring and new features. The main areas to focus on are as follow:

Grav 1.1 Features

• New Advanced Form Blueprints. Read about this powerful new functionality in the documentation.
• GPM Versioning. You can now specify requirements of dependencies. Such as requiring a specific version of another plugin or Grav itself.
• GPM Channels. We now support a Testing and Stable channel in GPM. This allows us to release beta releases without affecting stable installations. Simply release your plugin/theme as a pre-release in GitHub and it will be handled automatically as a beta release.
• Core Grav Processor Refactor. Thanks to toovy for a great refactor of Grav's core processing to make things more readable and flexible.
• Multi-part Downloads. This offers resumable downloads and streaming/looping HTML5 video
• Twig Processing in Frontmatter. This optional setting lets you use Twig variables in your frontmatter for all sorts of powerful setups.
• Blueprints in Plugins. We now allow the option for plugins to provide blueprints, not just themes.
• Developer CLI Tools. This is broken out into a new plugin but allows a developer to quickly create a scaffold for a new plugin or theme.
• Authentication of Proxies. Grav now supports authenticated proxy servers.
• Override default Parsedown functionality. Thanks to maxlysenko for adding this functionality.
• Assets handling improved. You can now exclude external files, control the before/after order of the pipelined files and better support the absolute_urls: true option.
• Individual localhost environments. Previously all localhost environments were handled by 'localhost', now we support virtual hosts as individual environments which allows for better mimicking of staging/production environments.
• More PHP Stream conversion. We've moved more hard-coded paths to streams to allow better multi-site support.
• Allow local themes outside of GPM. A new theme blueprint option gpm: false means you can have a local theme with the same name as a GPM theme and not have it overwritten or updated.
• Improved GPM installation with dependencies. This whole process has been much improved.
• Added many more new tests. We've added many more new tests to better help us ensure compatibility with code changes. Feel free to contribute and add more! When it comes to testing, the more the merrier!

Admin Plugin 1.1 Features

• JavaScript Rewrite. Admin is now built in ES6
• Default Theme Refactored. The default theme has been heavily refactored and has much better mobile support. You can also no collapse the sidebar manually as well as auto-switching to smaller sidebar on narrow devices.
• Nested Lists. Often requested in the 1.0 release, you can now have any field inside a list form field type!
• Editor Rebuilt. Our CodeMirror based editor has been rewritten to be more flexible and also is available in any form, not just on pages.
• Color Picker Field. We've added a powerful new color picker field that you can use as needed.
• Admin can now install dependencies. Previously only available with the CLI command, if you install a plugin with dependencies you will be prompted to also install any dependencies.
• Testing/Stable option. Configure this option dynamically in the Add Plugin and Add Theme pages.
• New Datepicker Field. The new one is more flexible and translatable compared to the previous version.
• Persistent States. We've added more persistent states for trees and tabs throughout the admin. So now those states are remembered after a page reload.
• Redirect on Login. Going to an admin login that needed authentication, you will now be redirected to your originally requested page, not just dumped into the dashboard.
• Admin Unique Cache. The admin's cache is now unique from the frontend site. This improves reliablility in several areas that was caused by front-end plugins and functionality corrupting admin data.
• User Profile Layout Improved. A UI cleanup on this page improves readability.

Next Steps

We already have addressed several bugs and issues that we have discovered in 1.1-beta.1 and a new set of betas will be released shortly. The great thing about Grav 1.1, is the new testing/stable channels available in GPM. This means that if you have downloaded the beta, you are already configured to use the new testing channel. All new betas will show up for as updates when available. However, your stable installs running 1.0.x will not see these.

Eventually when we are ready to release 1.1, we'll release as a stable release in GitHub, and set the channel back to stable, and it will then start showing up for regular users. We'll make sure that process will go as smooth as possible for all users.

Let us know if you have any questions, ideas, or just general thoughts!