As we step into 2025, we're reminded that the best journeys often begin with a choice. In the spirit of new beginnings, this release continues our commitment to making ApostropheCMS more flexible and adaptable to your preferred development paths.
In the past year we've steadily expanded the ways you can build with Apostrophe: from our shift to Vite, enabling easier integration of various frontend frameworks, to adding a route on our roadmap for more diverse templating approaches. Today, we're excited to showcase Apollo, our new Astro theme, which exemplifies this philosophy of choice. It's more than just a theme: it's a demonstration of how Apostrophe can harmonize with modern frameworks while maintaining the robust content management capabilities you rely on.
Introducing Apollo: Where Apostrophe Meets Astro
After the successful launch of our apostrophe-astro extension last year, we're thrilled to present Apollo - a full-featured theme that showcases the seamless integration between ApostropheCMS and Astro. While our initial starter kit demonstrated the basics, Apollo expands the possibilities significantly, implementing a comprehensive set of widgets that leverage the best of both platforms.
What makes this integration special is how it preserves the essence of both systems. Content managers get to keep everything they love about Apostrophe - the intuitive UI, in-context editing, and robust workflow tools - while developers can harness Astro's powerful templating and routing capabilities without writing complex data fetching logic. The schemas you create in Apostrophe, whether for widgets, pages, or pieces, automatically become available in your Astro templates.
We envision Apollo as both a production-ready theme and an inspiration for the community. Each component demonstrates our best practices for bridging these platforms, and we hope it serves as a foundation for developers to build and share their own themes and widgets. We're looking forward to seeing how you adapt and extend Apollo for your own needs.
Ready to get started? You can clone the Apollo repository on GitHub, follow the setup instructions, and start building your next project. We are eager for feedback on how to further improve the integration between these two platforms, and make it easier to onboard your projects!
Apostrophe Palette: Nest-able menus and UI updates that support configuration-rich projects
The @apostrophecms-pro/palette extension provides a great way to customize the CSS on your site and now the UI is even better. Based on feedback from our community, the grouping and presentation of styling groups have been significantly streamlined. You can now nest submenus to any depth, making it easier to break up large configurations. Additionally, now you can use CSS variables both in Palette and the standard color picker field. The options of the color picker have been revamped to simplify and expand your choices. Check out the documentation for more!
Enhanced Import/Export Capabilities
We made several significant improvements to the Import-Export extension for this release. Pages linked through the "Internal Page" option in rich text editors can now be exported as related documents, along with images embedded inline in rich text widgets. These enhancements make it easier to maintain content relationships when transferring content between environments. The export modal interface has also been refined with improved animations and better handling of related content types.
Whether you're building with Apollo and Astro, customizing your site with Palette, or managing content with our enhanced import/export tools, Apostrophe 4.12.0 gives you the power to choose your path. Get started with a simple npm update and show us what you'll build next!
Join in the GitHub Discussion for the full changelog and to share your feedback.