Some tools make work easier. Great tools make work feel like magic. They remove friction, keeping you in the zone—whether you're fine-tuning a site’s brand, managing content, or making layout changes on the fly.
In 2025, ApostropheCMS is refining and adding key features to make site building smoother, more intuitive, and a bit more joyful. This update focuses on three major areas: Refinements to Apostrophe Palette, the introduction of templatable widgets called Sections, and a framework for adding more in-context widget controls called, cleverly, Custom Widget Tools.
Palette: Structure Meets Flexibility
Designing a site should feel natural—not like wrestling with code or hunting through endless menus of settings. Palette lets editors fine tune a site’s look and feel with a structured, intuitive UI while keeping developers in control of the underlying design system.
Instead of scattered style controls, Palette organizes everything into a clear, navigable interface. Editors can adjust typography, colors, spacing, and more—previewing changes instantly—without digging through settings or touching CSS. In 2025, updates to Palette focus on making customization smoother, faster, and easier to navigate, even for complex configurations.
What’s New in 2025?
- Refined UI: A more polished layout, better field organization, and more intuitive spacing for selects, sliders, inputs, and color pickers.
- Nested Menus: Large styling configurations stay clean and navigable, with deeper but more structured organization.
- Search: Find exactly what you need without jumping in and out of menus.
The visual style is most obvious difference: A sleek, airy, more space-conscious interface for interacting with your various selects, sliders, inputs, and color pickers. We’ve dialed in type and UI sizes, expanded elements that needed more space, and further refined Apostrophe’s small-sized fields that Palette uses. In addition to general visual polish we have two new ways of navigating your site’s Palette configuration: Nest-able menus and Search.
Most user feedback around the current version of Palette boils down to: large Palette configurations become unwieldy to navigate for editors. The developer says “I made it all configurable!” and the editor says “But I can’t find what I need to change!” In response we’ve broadened the capabilities of Palette’s group feature so that developers can infinitely nest submenus within one another. Nested menus allow for structured, intuitive navigation, preventing style settings from becoming overwhelming; deeper but simpler. By breaking stylable features down into a tree you may dig a little bit deeper but what you find at the end if clear and lightweight.
Nested menus and a refined UI have been released with Apostrophe 4.12.0, making the update available to anyone with an Apostrophe Pro subscription. Search in Palette will be implemented in an upcoming release, enabling predictive text search across all your fields and groups.
Sections: Create Once, Reuse Everywhere
Sections turn repeatable content into a streamlined workflow. Instead of rebuilding the same widgets over and over or copying and pasting them across pages, editors can simply build a widget once, save it as a section, and drop it in wherever it’s needed—keeping the site cohesive while cutting down on busywork. Centralized management ensures updates are easy and visibility is clear, so everyone stays aligned on what’s available and in use.
Imagine you have a flexible Call to Action widget that you use to message different things throughout your site. One of the things you use it for is linking a sales inquiry form with a specific third party configuration, which appears on several pages of your site. Now, instead of creating the widget by hand or doing several copy-paste jobs from page to page, you can create the sales CTA once, save it the Sections library, and drop it into the other areas as appropriate. From there you can re-visit the templated CTA in the Sections manager, make updates to it, clone it into a new variant, or delete it. Once added to a page the section becomes fully owned by the document and is free to modify as a one-off.
Key Features
- Templating at the Widget Level: Define reusable widget configurations, including pre-populated content and nested widgets.
- Centralized Management: Create, edit, clone, and delete section templates from a dedicated interface.
- Template detachment: Once a Section is placed in a document, it becomes fully owned by that document and is no longer bound to the template.
Why It Matters
Manually duplicating widgets or copy-pasting configurations is slow and error-prone. Sections streamline this process, making it easier to maintain consistency across a site. Additionally, centralized visibility of section templates improves editorial team awareness by providing a clear reference for reusable components, reducing redundant work and ensuring alignment across different content contributors.
Custom Widget Tools: Inline Controls for Real-Time Adjustments
Some settings—like animations, spacing, or layout adjustments—just don’t make sense to edit inside a modal. You need to see the effect in real-time. Custom Widget Tools put essential controls right where they belong: on the page itself. Instead of bouncing between an editor window and a preview, you tweak settings in place and see the result instantly.
Editing a widget in Apostrophe can go something like this: Add a widget to a page, shape certain parts of it in-context (add text, add and arrange child widgets), then edit additional settings in the widget’s editor modal. This helps separate visualized content from form data, but there can be settings that fall in between these two poles—properties that have a visual or UX implication that need to be tweaked or seen in-context. This is the problem Custom Widget Tools seeks to solve with configuration to call out certain fields from the widget’s schema and add them to the widget’s in-context UI so that changes can be seen instantly.
Imagine you have a site where each widget can animate as the user scrolls. Each widget’s schema might include settings for animation style, direction, duration, and delay. Editing and previewing these settings makes the most sense in-context, directly on the page—not buried in a modal.
With inline controls, you can tweak an animation’s timing or direction and see the effect immediately, without opening, adjusting, saving, and closing a modal just to check your work. This real-time feedback loop makes fine-tuning animations faster, more intuitive, and more precise, ensuring the final result feels polished and intentional—without the trial-and-error frustration.
Build Smarter, Not Harder
Great tools don’t just add features—they remove friction. With the 2025 enhancements to Palette and the introduction of Sections and Widget Tools, ApostropheCMS is making site-building faster, smoother, and more intuitive than ever. Whether it’s styling your site with precision, streamlining reusable content, or fine-tuning widgets in real time, these updates are designed to help teams do more with less.
Many of the updates regarding Apostrophe Palette have been implemented and released with Apostrophe 4.12.0 with search on the way. Apostrophe Palette is currently part of our Pro offering, so get in touch if your interested in starting a subscription.
Want to follow along? Have a question or an insight? All three of these features are on our public roadmap, ready for your feedback.