Coaster CMS Version 5.3 released..

We’ve been working in the background on getting Coaster CMS version 5.3 ready for release in line with the release of Laravel 5.3 – announced here. We have made a number of very exciting additions to the features that now come with Coaster because that’s always a good thing! These include the ability to create forms for repeater block content (this gives rise to an easy way to create a comments section for a blog for example), and also a simple theme editor that allows you to edit your themes (not add files / blocks yet) from the admin (if you so wish).

Coaster CMS Version 5. 3, Features and updates

• Dashboard update, the dashboard has been overhauled to provide more information, including recent posts that appear on the Coaster CMS blog.
• Theme template and style editor
• Advanced group page features allowing the formation of blog systems and other categorised content from the admin (see blog on updated demo theme as an example)
• Repeater forms.
  This feature allows you to create a frontend form for any repeater, allowing comment forms as an obvious starting point (see blog on the updated demo theme)
• Laravel Events; from a coding point of view, we’ve added events to key points in the frontend and a couple to the admin. We will add to these over time and document them here. This will enable developers to hook additional elements into Coaster builds.
• Subtle design change to give the page forms more space

There are a number of other smaller changes under the hood including migrating to Laravel 5.3’s new routes file structure and the deprecation of some underscore functions. These changes are in part, due to Laravel 5.3 and part of a drive for better consistency in the codebase. Please feel free to comment with any feature requests or problems either here or on Github. We really appreciate feedback to make Coaster CMS better.

Upgrade notes:

If you are upgrading from version 5.2 you shouldn’t have any problems. We have tested the process but obviously, every site is different so let us know if you do encounter problems!