On The Road to Plone 6 - Volto 14 Released

Volto continues to innovate at a fast pace towards Plone 6. Today we released another major milestone on our road to Plone 6: Volto 14.

Volto 14 was in the making since September 2021 and it is in active use in various projects at Eau de Web, Red Turtle, Rohberg, kitconcept, and others.

Volto 14 comes with a set of new exiting features: a new search block that supports faceted search, locking support, a new seamless mode that makes deploying Volto easier, a new mobile navigation and support for Node 16.

Faceted Search Block

The new search block allows editor to create sophisticated faceted searches through the web without writing a single line of code.

Editors can define criteria for the content that is listed, like in the existing listing block in Volto.

Then editors can then choose arbitrary facets that are displayed to the users to choose from to narrow down the search.

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Locking

Locking in a Content Management System is a mechanism to prevent users from accidentially overriding each others changes.

When a user edits a content object in Plone, the object is locked until the user hits the save or cancel button. If a second user tries to edit the object at the same time, she will see a message that this object is locked.

Content object in Volto 14 that is locked by another user

Content object in Volto 14 that is locked by another user

Locking requires at least plone.restapi 8.9.0 or plone.restapi 7.4.0 to be installed.

Seamless Mode

The new “seamless mode” allows zero configuration deployment by avoiding hardcoded environment variables in builds involved, and establishing good sensible defaults when setting up deployments (and also in development). So the developer/devOps doesn’t have to overthink their setups.

These are its main features:

  • Runtime environment variables
  • Unified traversal ++api++
  • Use Host header to auto-configure the API_PATH

and these immediate benefits:

  • Avoid having to expose and publish the classic UI if you don’t really need it
  • If possible, avoid having to rewrite all API responses, since it returns paths that do not correspond to the original object handled and “seen” from Volto, so you have to adjust them (via a code helper) in a lot of call responses.
  • Simplify Docker builds, making all the configuration via the runtime environment variables

Seamless Mode requires at least plone.rest 2.0.0a1 to be installed.

New Mobile Navigation

We polished the mobile navigation for Volto 14 to improve the user experience on mobile.

New mobile navigation in action on the Plone Conference 2021 website

New mobile navigation in action on the Plone Conference 2021 website

Node 16

Volto 16 will support Node 16 in addition to Node 14 and Node 12. Node 16 will receive security updates until April 2024.

Plone 6

Volto 14 is an important step towards Plone 6. Volto 15 will switch the default editor from DraftJS to Slate editor and it is planned to be ready in Q1/Q2 2022. This is the last big step for Volto before Plone 6 can be released.