What's new in v2

The UI object

A block or a hero has always carried a handful of appearance parameters: how many columns, which grid, how it is aligned. In v1 they sat flat at the root of the block, next to its content, and there were only a few of them.

They are now grouped into a single ui object, which separates what the block says from how it looks, and leaves room to grow without cluttering the block.

# Before: flat, and only a few parameters
blocks:
  - type: informations
    column: 3
    ratio: 1

# After: everything under ui
blocks:
  - type: informations
    ui:
      column: 3
      ratio: 1
      grid: large
      offset: center
      align: center
      theme: dark
      scrollsnap: md

Choosing which controls appear

v1 hardcoded the object to theme, grid and offset. In v2 the set is driven by params, so you decide which controls the editor sees and which values they offer.

admin:
  fields:
    grid:
      options: [container, small, medium, large, full]
    theme:
      options: [light, dark, accent]
    ui:
      fields: [theme, grid, offset, align]

The field is now labelled Layout & appearance instead of UI.

These params decide which controls the editor sees, never what they hold. No ui field is prefilled, because a CMS default is saved to the front matter of every entry created after it: the content would carry the site’s design decisions, and changing one later would leave the existing entries behind. A look given to a whole block type belongs outside the content, which is what the next section is for.

Default appearance per block type

The config collection gains a blocks file, written to /data/blocks.yml, holding the default ui of each block type. It has the shape a block takes in its front matter, and is read key by key, so a field left empty is ignored rather than erasing a default.

Add it to the collection the way you add any config file, by listing it in files:

admin:
  collections:
    config:
      files: [banner, footer, credit, blocks, seo]

The form is generated from admin.blocks.enable, one collapsible section per block type, with the selected-* variants expanded per enabled collection exactly as the block picker expands them. A section arrives open when it already carries a value, so the screen says at a glance which types the site styles.

Unlike the rest of the config collection, this file is not translated: how a block looks is not language content.

The fields of a config file

Each file of the config collection ships its own set of fields. admin.files.<name>.fields replaces that set, without touching the files list, so changing the fields of one file no longer means restating every other:

admin:
  files:
    footer:
      fields: [newsletter, cta, blocks]
    seo:
      fields: [title, description, image_seo]

Available on every file of the module but schema and blocks. Left undefined, each keeps the fields the module declares, such as title, text_area, cta, blocks for the footer.

Navigation

The menus leave the config collection for a collection of their own, menus, listed just before it. The header and the footer each get two menus, a primary and a secondary one, where v1 had one menu for the header and one for the footer.

The footer also accepts blocks, not just an information text.

See the menus collection See menus

Nested collections

A collection can show its entries as a folder tree and let editors organise them in subfolders. Entries are stored as Hugo branch bundles (an _index file in a folder of its own), so a page can carry children and page resources.

Set the depth globally, or per collection when only one of them is a tree:

admin:
  nested:
    depth: 2 # every collection
  collections:
    docs:
      nested:
        depth: 4 # this one alone, overriding the global

The depth counts path segments below the collection folder, and is what limits how deep an editor may go.

New fields

Other additions: a reorder configuration for collections (Sveltia CMS), the columns of the table view (Sveltia CMS, Static CMS and Pages CMS), a default sort for the entry list, the image of each entry in the list (Sveltia CMS, CloudCannon), collection options written for every CMS that has an equivalent, a chosen order for the collections, with dividers between groups in Sveltia CMS, blocks on the persons and products collections, firstname and lastname on persons, a file input for form fields, and an optional format on the datetime widget for Decap and Sveltia storage.

An icon shortcode joins the markdown editor as well, for CloudCannon, Decap, Netlify and Sveltia CMS.

Computed values

A new compute widget builds a read-only field from the other fields of the entry, and refreshes it as they are typed. Only available with Sveltia CMS

It has no equivalent elsewhere, neither in Decap, Netlify and Static CMS nor in Pages CMS, CloudCannon and TinaCMS, so every other CMS emits an empty field and the value stays typed by hand.

A value template references a field with {{fields.name}} and accepts a string transformation after a pipe, as in {{fields.title | slugify}}. Inside a List, {{index}} returns the item position, stored as a number.

A title built from other fields

title_page reads a compute template and hands it to the widget. Left undefined, it stays the regular text input, which is also what a project running any other CMS gets.

The persons collection does this by default: a person is named after their first and last name, so the page title is derived rather than asked for, and never typed twice.

admin:
  collections:
    persons:
      fields:
        - draft
        - title_page: { i18n: duplicate, compute: '{{fields.firstname}} {{fields.lastname}}' }
        - firstname
        - lastname
        - body