Apostrophe 4.27.0: Floating widget editor and styles editor now stable

Hello Apostrophe Community!

ApostropheCMS 4.27.0 introduces a redesigned widget editing experience with a flexible interface, graduates the Styles Editor from beta to stable, and adds support for right-to-left languages.

Floating Widget Editor: Edit Without Obstruction

The widget editor has been redesigned to allow content managers to move, resize, and position it anywhere on the screen. This addresses two longstanding challenges in content editing: the widget editor modal blocking your view of the content you're editing and developer intervention being required just to resize it.

The new windowed editor can be:

• Moved to any position on screen, keeping your content visible while you edit
• Resized to show more or fewer options at once
• Docked back to the traditional centered position when preferred

This improvement affects all widget types, making it easier to see how your changes affect the page layout in real time. The flexible positioning is particularly valuable when working with widget styles, where seeing the visual result while adjusting design options helps editors make better choices faster. Note: When working on a widget that's nested, the original sidebar view will open to avoid multiple floating windows.

Styles Editor: Now Stable

Our new Styles Editor, introduced in beta last month, is now production-ready. This feature provides visual style editing for both site-wide design tokens and per-widget style variations, moving capabilities previously available only in the Pro Palette extension into open-source core.

If you tested the Styles Editor during the beta period, thank you for your feedback. The module is now stable and ready for production use. For teams currently using Palette, migration to Styles remains straightforward via the provided migrate-to-styles task.

See Styles in Action

Want to see the feature in a real implementation? Our new public demo at demo.apostrophecms.com showcases both global and per-widget styles in a production-ready configuration. As we streamline our starter kit offerings, the public demo project represents our current recommendation for getting started with ApostropheCMS. The demo It features a comprehensive implementation of styling patterns you can adapt for your own sites.

You can explore the demo online or fork the code on GitHub to examine how global design tokens and widget style variations work together in practice:

• apostrophecms/public-demo - Traditional full-stack implementation
• apostrophecms/astro-public-demo - Headless implementation with Astro
   

Right-to-Left Language Support

Projects serving content in right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew can now configure text direction at the locale level. The new direction property in locale configuration controls content directionality, while the slugDirection option manages URL slug formatting.

Individual schema fields can override the locale-level direction setting when needed, allowing for precise control in multilingual projects. Note that while content editing supports RTL text, the admin UI layout itself remains left-to-right.

AI Helper Updates

AI Helper, an experimental extension that provides AI-powered image generation and text content creation, has been refactored to use a provider-based architecture. This experimental module now supports multiple AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini, with a clear path for developers to add custom providers.

The extension remains in beta as we refine AI integration patterns that will eventually inform core ApostropheCMS features. Teams using AI Helper should expect ongoing refinement to the provider system. We welcome feedback on this approach as we explore AI capabilities within the platform.

Improved Internationalization

The new intlMapping option in locale configuration allows projects to map custom locale codes to standard ones for JavaScript's Intl API. This is particularly useful when your locale naming doesn't align with standard Intl.DateTimeFormat locales — for example, mapping your custom code to en-GB for British English formatting.

CLI Support for Hybrid Projects

The Apostrophe CLI now properly detects and handles hybrid ApostropheCMS + Astro projects with a backend/ directory structure. The create command will set up these projects correctly, though the add command is not yet supported in hybrid contexts.

Additionally, the CLI now validates project shortName values to prevent potential security issues, restricting names to letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores.

Additional Improvements

This release includes several refinements:

• Safer Image Handling: Image and attachment helpers no longer throw errors, preventing display issues when media references become invalid
• Rich Text Rendering: Fixed a bug where rich text images and permalinks weren't properly rendered in external frontend frameworks like Astro
• Layout Column Help Text: Clarified the breakpoints option (now labelBreakpoints) and added a showBreakpointsHelp option to control help text visibility

These improvements are ready for you to explore! Update your projects with npm update and let us know what you think on our roadmap.

🚀 Happy coding!