Updates on the v5 delay

Announcements
1

Hey everyone,

whenever we go silent for a while, our long-term community members probably already know that we are either working really hard on some final launch steps or we got some problems. This time, it’s unfortunately option b).

During the beta, we ran into three major issues with our new version system.

The first one is already solved and stable now (at least on our develop branch) We had a problem in our frontend code with the way that changes in the Panel are stored. There was a nasty race condition which could lead to really weird side-effects when publishing changes.

The second one is also solved. A nested files field in a structure field could lead to content loss. Not great at all. Content loss is always the worst-case scenario. It took quite a while to debug this properly and find the cause, but it’s working reliably now.

The third one is creating headaches for 3+ weeks. With the new backend code for our version system, we broke some virtual page setups (including our own for our documentation) So we refactored the code again and solved that part, just to run into another problem that potentially breaks quite a lot of custom hook setups. Breaking changes are inevitable whenever we want to move forward and get rid of legacy code, but we also really don’t want to make those upgrades unnecessarily hard.

TL;DR: We need a bit more time to get this right. It does not make sense to push this release through before we are confident about it.

We know that some of you already plan projects with it and it sucks to keep you waiting. We are sorry about such delays and hope you understand.

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2

Personally I can get right behind this level of honesty and I think we’ve all tried running into unexpected problems on projects, so all I can say is when v5 comes it will be awesome and I won’t moan over the wait :slightly_smiling_face:

3 Likes
3

Love this post, company and product. Happy to wait, excited for the launch.

3 Likes
4

Keep up the good work.

… when I hear “version system” my imagination yearns for loading older versions of pages from kirby-git-content or kirby-versions with a gui like kirby-revisions.

… what is “versions” you are working on?

5

You can find more about it here: Kirby 5 | Kirby CMS

We’ve built a brand new architecture to store different versions of a page. This allows us to finally preview changes properly in rendered templates. But we’ve decided to start with a simple setup with two versions: the latest published state of a page and the changed state of a page. The editing experience in the panel feels pretty much identical to what we had in v4, but with a shiny new preview mode. Under the hood, a lot of new stuff is happening though. Changes are no longer stored in the browser in localStorage, but on your disk in a new _changes subfolder. This will allow us to introduce multiple versions of a page in a later state and come up with something like revisions or multiple states of a page.

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