Plone 6.0.6 released

New plone.restapi endpoints for @site and @navroot, Bootstrap 5.3 update in Classic UI, bugfixes, cleanups

Overview

The sixth Patch release of Plone 6.0 for this year is an update with small fixes, translation updates and improvements for both the Volto frontend, Classic UI and basic services.

Our plone.restapi module has recevied two new endpoints for @site and @navroot that better support building and styling for example subsite content types/sections when using Volto.

As always we are cleaning up our code base while working on Plone 6.1, packages that still share the same minor version will also receive these code cleanups in our Plone 6.0 maintenance releases.

Use of Bootstrap 5.3 in Classic UI custom themes

There is one important change for Classic UI setups that you need to take care of if you are using a custom theme and decide to also upgrade it to Bootstrap 5.3. So far Plone 6.0 Classic UI has been using Bootstrap 5.2 in its frontend code. Bootstrap 5.3 introduces a new color mode system that is non breaking with Bootstrap 5.2 and is the foundation for Dark Mode support that will be added to the Plone 6.1 Classic UI default theme.

If you have pinned the Boostrap version your custom theme resources to 5.2 (and you should have), Read the detailed technical release notes for Plone 6.0.6 on how to update your main scss theme file and other updates to support Bootstrap 5.3 in your own theme to supply some missing variables.

There has been discussion among the developers if this was wise to dobecause it can break custom themes, but the advantages of having Bootstrap 5.3 already in Plone 6.0 and not having to maintain 2 branches at the moment outweigh the small inconvenience for custom themes.

Please check the detailed release notes for Plone 6.0.6 if you want an full list of changes made in all Plone packages.

Volto Frontend improvements

The default frontend for new Plone 6 sites is Volto. Latest 'bundled' release of Volto for Plone 6.0.6 is Volto version 16.21.2

Note that Volto is a separate JavaScript frontend for which you need to run a server process with NodeJS. Also, existing Plone sites need some or more extensive changes to be upgraded to use the Volto Frontend, please read the upgrade and migration guides for more information. Volto was updated from 16.20.7 to 16.21.2 and mainly has bug fixes and internal improvements.

  • Another 'low level' improvement to mention is a patch to support Node 18 while using Volto 16. This wil allow us for example to keep supporting Volto 16 when Node 16 goes out of offical support. The difficulty here is not in Volto itself, but in our Use of the webpack library that is still version 4 for Volto 16.

It is a challenging and ongoing effort to keep older Volto versions supported after their initial release when the underlying components and also Node versions we use (the Javascript runtime for server side Javascript applications) have a much tighter release and deprecation schedule then was the case some years ago

As a community we face the same challenge with new Python minor releases being supported much shorter and deprecated faster than Python releases done 5-10 years ago.

Download and install Plone 6.0.6

Please go to our download page for more information on how to download Plone. Installation instructions can be found on 6.docs.plone.org .