Neos React UI - Status Update

We've fixed many bugs and implemented missing features in the first two weeks of the React UI development sprint. Read on for details!

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I wanted to give you a short update about our current efforts so far. Since we reached our 30 000 € Milestone on beginning of September, we quickly gathered the team, set up the project, estimated the currently known issues and added a big buffer for at-the-time unknown bugs.

So far, we were able to fix most of the known bugs; and also fix many previously-undiscovered bugs as we found them; leading to a big increase in stability and performance. Additional to this, we finished bigger features like the Select Editor data sources; and re-login on login timeout, which make the Neos UI more usable and stable.

Since the release of beta3 beginning of July, more than 130 pull requests have been merged; with September being our busiest month with 80 Pull Requests merged so far.

More Sponsors

A huge thank you goes to the following new sponsors, who supported the effort after September 1:

We also like to thank Lorenz Ulrich for an Individual Sponsorship!

Timeline

We're aiming for implementing most of the bigger remaining features in September, so that we can start testing more and more real-world projects starting beginning of October. If you want to help us, please try out the Neos React UI on your project (Neos 3.0 and upwards); and create issues for errors you see and glitches you are noticing!

Implemented Features since Beta3

Data Sources for Select Editors

We've finally implemented Data Sources for Select editors, such that select editor contents can be pre-filled by PHP data sources. Alongside the implementation, Data Source values are now cached client-side in a LRU cache, leading to more direct feedback when showing previously-loaded nodes. We have some further improvements planned (maybe after 1.0); which you can see at this GitHub issue.

Node Tree Drag&Drop redone

Node Tree Drag&Drop had some issues in our previous betas: On every drop, the user had to specify an exact position on where to drop the element in a modal dialog. Now, we re-created the old behavior of visually showing where the drop will be placed; and furthermore improved usability with large trees.

Relogin on Session Timeout

If your session timed out (or the server logged you out), we now show a modal dialog allowing you to re-login. During the period of the dialog, we pause all backend requests; and re-start them as soon as you entered your username / password again. This greatly reduces the risk of loosing data if a re-login happens.

We plan to apply the same principle if you loose your backend connection, e.g. due to bad WIFI.

Inline Editing now works reliable with span and other inline elements

CKEditor, our new editor of choice, gets lots of things right, is extremely stable, and the team behind it supports us just fantastically. There's one feature, however, which CKEditor does not support (intentionally): Inline editing of span elements and other inline elements. In our previous beta release, this was quite unusable, and it was very easy to actually break the editor in these cases (e.g. when pasting into span elements).

Now, we implemented the correct pasting of content into inline elements, as well as fixed the placeholder display in this case.

Lots of bugfixes and stability improvements in all areas of the code

Since beta3, lots of bugfixes have been made, among them:

  • Node Tree Filter and Search has been implemented
  • proper highlighing of changes in all parts of the inspector
  • implemented end-to-end Tests with Testcafe
  • performance improvements relevant for larger trees
  • fixed DateTime inspector editor
  • made structure tree toggeable

Release of 1.0.0-beta5

We've just released the version 1.0.0-beta5, which you can download through Composer as usual.

Please help us by testing the new UI, and add bug reports on http://github.com/neos/neos-ui/issues. We're looking forward to the continue stabilizing the UI.

Thanks again to all sponsors!

Thanks to all sponsors who have supported our efforts so far. If you want to still participate in the sponsoring, you'll find all relevant info in this blog post.

Core Feature Sponsors (5 000 €)

Premium Sponsors (2 000 €)

We'd also like to thank our value sponsors Tyll Weiß (2x), vivomedia.de, Kaufmann Digital, webexcess, bit.loft, Sebastian Helzle, web&co, networkteam, Schwabe AG and our individual sponsors contenance, werk4, Peter Rauber, Kathleen Peschke, Jonathan Uhlmann and Lorenz Ulrich for supporting the project.