2.0.0

Fine-grained Access Control

A common requirement, especially for larger websites with many editors, is the possibility to selectively control access to certain backend tools and parts of the content. For example so that editors can only edit certain pages or content types or that they are limited to specific workspaces. These access restrictions are used to enforce certain workflows and to reduce complexity for editors.

With Neos 2.0, we introduce a way to define Access Control Lists (ACL) in a very fine-grained manner, enabling the following use-cases:

  • hide parts of the node tree completely (useful for multi-site websites and frontend-login)

  • protect arbitrary method calls (as possible before)

  • define the visibility of arbitrary elements depending on the authenticated user (as possible before)

  • show only specific Backend Modules

  • allow to create/edit only specific Node Types

  • allow to only edit parts of the Node Tree

  • allow to only edit a specific dimension

The above examples are all based upon specific privilege types; defining what can be access-restricted.

Furthermore, the way Neos and Flow handle roles has been completely revised: A user is assigned to one or more specific roles, defining who the user is. For each role, a list of privileges is specified, defining the exact permissions of users assigned to each role.

In the Neos user interface, it is possible to assign not just a single role to a user, but instead a list of multiple roles. This allows to define the permissions a user actually has on a much more fine-grained level than before, where only the distinction between Editor and Administrator was made. Additionally, the user management module has basic support for multiple accounts per user: a user may, for example, have one account for backend access and another one for access of a member-only area on the respective website.

As an example, a privilege only giving access to a specific part of the node tree looks as follows:

'TYPO3\TYPO3CR\Security\Authorization\Privilege\Node\EditNodePrivilege':
    'YourSite:EditWebsitePart':
      matcher: 'isDescendantNodeOf("/sites/yourwebsite/custom")'

Translated Neos User Interface

The User Interface of Neos is now localized into multiple languages – making it easier to use for non-English speakers. This includes the content editing experience like Node Type definitions and editors as well as backend modules.

The preferred language can be selected in the user settings from the user menu.

If you want to translate Neos to your language or want to help improve translations, head over to http://translate.neos.io/ and start translating or find out more at https://www.neos.io/develop/translations.html.

Translation & Content Variants

While translation of content, or more broadly, content variants, are the flagship feature of Neos 1.2, there were still some missing spots to fill to make working with content variants really awesome. Neos 2.0 includes quite some of these improvements.

First, we re-implemented the way an initial translation of a document from one language to another works. If you wanted to translate from English to French in Neos 1.2, you needed to define that the French-language version of your page falls back to the “English” version – effectively showing English content if it has not been translated in French yet. With Neos 2.0, you do not need these fall-backs anymore. Instead, if you choose a content variant which does not exist yet, you are asked whether you want to start with an empty page or copy the original content and start modifying it.

Second, we re-thought how the node tree should behave in Neos: In order to reduce confusion, if you move a page to a different position in the hierarchy, it is moved in all variants. However, if you move content from left to right column, this only affects the current variant. After having tried numerous options in the last months, we believe that this way leads to the most predictable editing experience.

Third, if you copy content from one variant to another (e.g. a content element which has been created in English, but not yet in French), the link between the original content and the translation is now preserved. This is an important technical foundation, based on which features such as a “list of changes in the original language” will be implemented in later Neos releases.

Cloud-Capable Resource and Media Management

In today’s world, the use of cloud services is very prevalent. People use Google drive, Dropbox or Box.com to share files and assets. Furthermore, applications of today should be deployable on PAAS systems like Heroku or AWS EC2. Because these platforms do not contain a writable and persistent file system, alternative storage systems for assets are needed. For highly scalable websites, the use of Content Delivery Networks for serving static content helps to keep sites well performing and fast.

With Neos 2.0 and Flow 3.0, we introduce a completely written core of resource management, which features a plugin-based storage and publishing mechanism, providing support for various cloud providers and other scenarios.

On the one hand, this now allows to store persistent resources like images which the user has uploaded in Amazon S3; making Flow and Neos a lot more straightforward to run on PAAS.

On the other hand, resources which are used on the website output (like cropped and resized images) can be published to a CDN like Cloudfront, Akamai or Rackspace CloudFiles.

As a reference implementation for third-party plugins we created a package supporting Rackspace Cloudfiles. A second implementation, for Amazon S3, is about to be finished.

This feature is also the basis for seamlessly choosing assets from Google Drive or Dropbox in the Neos Media Management, which will be implemented in a later version of Neos.

SEO Improvements

With Neos 2.0, we’ve added some first tools which help in improving search engine ranks:

  • Separation of page and navigation title

  • allow to set description, keywords and robots information per-page

  • machine-readable links to alternative-language versions

  • XML sitemap generation

Furthermore, the appearance of a website when embedded inside tweets or Facebook posts can be adjusted (Open Graph).

These features are provided by a separate package https://packagist.org/packages/typo3/neos-seo

Google Analytics

For many websites, getting key insights on their usage patterns is a requirement for improving content. That’s why we created a seamless integration of Google Analytics; showing the current access numbers in an inspector tab of the current page.

Google Analytics integration for Neos 2.0 can be easily installed by adding the package https://packagist.org/packages/typo3/neos-googleanalytics

Media browser/module

The media browser has been improved in many areas.

The concept of asset collections has been introduced, which is an additional layer to separate large amounts of assets across different sites. A default asset collection can be set for a site, resulting in every asset uploaded for that site automatically being added to that collection. Asset collections can have separate tags or share tags among them.

Furthermore, searching, sorting and filtering for assets is now possible, the list view has been extended to include file size, type & thumbnail image. It is now possible to rename existing tags.

Error handling, drag and drop handling and notifications have been improved.

Editing Improvements

Searching is no longer case sensitive, including link wizards, reference(s) editors and the node tree filter.

In the editing area, the content elements toolbar now supports insert/paste before/into/after similar to the navigate component.

Image handling has been improved: Added support for SVG files. Image uploads are now possible using drag & drop in the inspector. Cropping and resizing of images can now be configured per-node type, and resizing is by default switched off to fit better with responsive websites. To enable the old behavior which allows resizing, change the following configuration in Settings.yaml:

TYPO3:
  Neos:
    userInterface:
      inspector:
        dataTypes:
          'TYPO3\Media\Domain\Model\ImageInterface':
            editorOptions:
              features:
                resize: TRUE

Furthermore, the inspector now shows detailed node information such as creation date, last modified date, last publication date, node name & identifier.

Improvements to TypoScript & Eel

There have been various finetunings in TypoScript, Eel and FlowQuery:

In order to set new variables in the TypoScript context, you had to use @override in Neos <= 1.2. We found this name is misleading, so we renamed it to @context instead, deprecating @override.

The FlowQuery operations parentsUntil, nextUntil, prevUntil, prevAll and nextAll have been introduced.

Conditions are now properly executed in processors, so you can use @if to determine whether a processor should be applied or not.

We now support nested Eel object literals such as {bar: {foo: ‘baz’}}, as well as more comparison operators (<, <=, >, >=) in FlowQuery filters.

Documentation Restructuring

The documentation has been moved to ReadTheDocs, and in this process been completely restructured. We now also provide PDF and ePub renderings of the documentation; so it is easier to search it offline.

Find the documentation at http://neos.readthedocs.org/en/2.0/index.html

Data views in inspector (experimental)

Data views is a new feature for the inspector to be able to display custom views without having a property for it.

Supports a simple view, table view and time series view to display generic data from a data source. Include D3 for SVG graphs. Currently used in the Google Analytics package.

DISCLAIMER Be aware that this feature is still experimental and likely to have breaking changes in the future.

History / Event Log (experimental)

For Neos 2.0, we have explored to add an event log, which records all kinds of changes to a Neos instance. Initially, the event log helps to answer the following questions:

  • What content has changed since I have last used the system?

  • Audit Logging: Which users have been created or modified?

A small History module is included which allows to browse the history.

By default, this feature is currently disabled, as the history grows quite quickly and there is no function to prune the history yet. We also imagine that the history can be used to enable functionality like more intelligent publishing or merging of changes.

To enable this feature (at your own “risk”), put the following configuration in Settings.yaml:

TYPO3:
  Neos:
    eventLog:
      enabled: TRUE

Additional features

  • The storage format for the node data properties table has been changed to JSON from a serialized array

    This makes it a lot easier to alter properties in the database, prevents unserialization issues and boost performance.

  • Improved exception handling with better output and styling

  • Creation date, last modified date & last publication date for nodes

  • Possibility to extend content collection as content elements

  • Auto-created child node positions (define the order of auto-created child nodes)

  • Backend context helpers (easier to determine if in the backend context)

  • Node repair improvements (remove broken nodes, remove lost nodes, remove undefined properties, add missing default values, set position)

  • Usability improvements to the sites management modules to better support multiple sites

  • Auto-created ChildNodes can now have have defined positions to define the order they appear in the backend.

Upgrade instructions

See https://neos.io/develop/download/upgrade-instructions-2-0.html

!!! Breaking changes

  • Reload content without reloading the whole page

    This is breaking in case you rely on the whole page being reloaded when a property of a single node is changed. To achieve the previous behavior a new option called reloadPageIfChanged is introduced.

  • Pull in stable versions of 3rd party dependencies

    Remove the file Configuration/PackageState.php if issues occur with the Doctrine.Instantiator package.

  • Move PhpCodesniffer installation to Build folder

    See commit message for instructions.

  • Implement ContentCollection in pure TypoScript

    Change iterationName to content.iterationName to adjust existing content collections if that is used.

  • Method to easily determine if backend rendering

    Deprecates the TypoScript context variable editPreviewMode, can be replaced seamlessly with ${documentNode.context.currentRenderingMode.name} instead if used.

  • Add code migration for ImageVariant to ImageInterface change

    To adjust the code use the new class, it should be enough to run this on your site package(s): ./flow flow:core:migrate --package-key <sitepackagekey>

  • Centralized Neos user domain service

    The user:remove command has been renamed to user:delete. Additionally it drops support for the “–confirmation” option and now interactively asks for confirmation.

  • Account should not be available in the context

    This is breaking if you use the context variable ${account} in your own TypoScript. You should instead use ${Security.getAccount()} to retrieve it. Therefor you should also remove all usage of account in safed contexts for uncached TypoScript objects.

  • ContentCollection overwrites node directly

    This is breaking if you rely on the contentCollectionNode variable being set. You can retrieve the nearest ContentCollection via FlowQuery.

  • Add charset and collation to all MySQL migrations

    This is breaking if you have existing tables that do not use the utf8 charset and utf8_unicode_ci collation. To solve this you need to convert the existing tables. This can be done using the command: ./flow database:setcharset

  • Property mapper error on node properties of type date

    The code migration 20141218134700 can be run to adjust the code in your package(s): ./flow flow:core:migrate --package-key <packagekey>

  • Disable image resizing for image properties by default

    This change is breaking as the default resize feature is disabled by default now, which means you need to enable it if you rely on that feature.

  • Cleanup multi column rendering

    This is breaking if you rely on the MultiColumnItem having a template as MultiColumnItem is not a ContentCollection (so a plain tag). Attributes configured for MultiColumnItem still work as before.

  • Remove deprecated TYPO3.Neos:Page nodetype

  • Node path should always be lowercase

    This is breaking in case you have nodes with names that have uppercase letters and they are referenced by their path somewhere.

  • Minor changes to improve CR performance

    This is breaking if you rely on the fact that persists are triggered for each newly created Node. This was a side effect of assigning the highest index to the newly created Node and is now no longer needed in all cases. Therefor tests need to be adapted so that they do no longer rely on this behavior.

  • Fix unique constraint for workspace/dimensions

    This is breaking if you were unlucky enough to migrate between the merge of the the aforementioned change and this very change. See details in the commit message.

  • Node with identifier should only exist once per context

    This is breaking in case you have existing nodes in this situation, which you shouldn’t have though.

  • Throw exception for missing implementation class

    This can be breaking if relying on missing implementation classes being silenced and returning NULL.

  • Deprecate @override and replace it by @context

    The old syntax will still be supported, however you should adjust to the new syntax for streamlining.

  • Remove unused ServiceNodeController::getPageByNodePathAction

Further details can be found in the commit messages of the changes

See http://neos.readthedocs.org/en/stable/Appendixes/ChangeLogs/200.html

Note

Additionally all breaking changes in Flow 3.0 apply, see the release notes to further information. See http://flowframework.readthedocs.org/en/stable/TheDefinitiveGuide/PartV/ReleaseNotes/300.html