It’s our lucky seventh alpha

Another milestone has been reached. SilverStripe 4.0.0-alpha7 is out and ready for eager people to prod and sniff around. We're expecting this to be our last release before the beta phase. We’d like to call on the community to give us feedback on the last API changes we're planning until beta, which means that we’re going to freeze API changes when beta is released.

With our lucky seven, we’ve gambled and won two new members. We’re excited to have Saophalkun Ponlu and Aaron Carlino (aka Uncle Cheese). In fact, Aaron handled releasing this alpha soon after joining – that’s our Uncle Cheese for you.

To get setup, you can install this using composer:

composer create-project silverstripe/installer ./ss40 4.0.0-alpha7

You can also get pre-built zip/tar the download section.

As with any alpha release, this is not a standard release, so we do not recommend using this build for any production websites. Anyone is free to try this release out and give feedback to us.

Special mentions

Thanks for everyone who contributed to SilverStripe 4.0 during our open-door hackfest in Wellington and Auckland last month. It was great to see so many pull requests coming in for bug fixes. The Open Sourcerers team was doggy-paddling to stay afloat amidst all the changes. Together we closed an amazing 17 tickets and made a handful of SilverStripe modules 4.0 compatible, which is an awesome outcome!

Notable changes

DateField and DatetimeField

We’ve refactored DatetimeField, DateField and TimeField to rely on the HTML5 standard. This allows us to remove the jQuery datepicker, simplify localisation logic for datetime values and implement the React component equivalent.
This does mean a number of methods on those fields no longer exist. Check out the class API in case you may run into any errors.

TreeDropdownField

We’ve added a field-specific action API and refactored some ancient hierarchy code so that we could pull together the TreeDropdownField. This enables you to select files and pages from where you can have multiple layers of folders or pages.

Folder creation standardised

We’ve done away with the popup input box and opened up the editor panel on the right for creating folders. This means that creating folders provides a more consistent experience, similar to editing a folder or file.

Conclusion

Lots of changes behind the scenes, SilverStripe 4.0.0-alpha7 is getting close to a stable API. If you’re maintaining modules for SilverStripe, and you haven’t looked at upgrading yet, now is the best time to do it. Catching the problems early could mean a better solution could be found while the API is still fluctuating a little bit. 

Thanks to everyone who have tried out any of the alphas and given us feedback. For those that haven’t tried it yet, please give it a try now!