June 2025: The 'Make Rubocop Happier' release

Most of my time this month has gone into the Shop feature branch, which is getting close to an initial merge/release, hopefully in July/August.

In the main branch this month I have:

• Bumped Ruby from 3.4.2 to 3.4.3
• Changed the logout link to a logout button to get that working again (not sure exactly when it stopped working, but I assume it was at some point during the last few months of back-to-back Rails upgrades)
• Merged some contributions from @MrBowmanXD, which fixed some long-standing Rubocop warnings
• Merged a couple of gem updates from @dependabot, including one to mitigate a possible Rack DDoS flaw
• Added some documentation about the use of Rack::Attack

May 2025: The 'Shiny and New!' release

Headline news is of course the last step (for now!) in the recent series of sequential Rails upgrades - we're now on the latest current release, Rails 8.0, having started at 6.1 in January this year and worked our way through 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 in the last few months.

Also featured this month:

• Upgraded pagy to current (9.x) series (in #1957)
• Added and expanded Rack::Attack filtering to save error logs filling up with botspam from hacked WordPress sites (in #1960,
  #1961, #1963, and #1964)
• Plus various gem updates, whenever dependabot offered them

Full Changelog: v25.04...v25.05

April 2025: The "April's Cool" release

Once again, this month's main highlight is a Rails upgrade, from 7.1 to Rails 7.2

This was actually a much smaller change than the last two releases. I think there were more changes for Rubocop this month than there were for Rails.

Also prism replaced parser, nokogiri got at least two security fixes this month, I replaced my .ruby-version hack with the new official built-in version of the same thing, and cloudflare-rails is finally completely up to date.

March 2025: Another month, another bump

This month's release takes us from Rails 7.0 to Rails 7.1

It also takes us from Ruby 3.2 to Ruby 3.4

And that's about it for this month's news 🙂

February 2025: UPDATE ALL THE (most important) THINGS!!!

MAJOR updates!

BREAKING changes!!

Ruby 3.2
Rails 7.0
... and some other stuff 😁

January 2025: 'New year, old me'

One breaking change - for safer merging of code under active development; it is now compulsory to specify which plugins should be loaded, using the SHINYCMS_PLUGINS env var. If SHINYCMS_PLUGINS is not set when the CMS is launched, it will exit immediately.

Otherwise, this is mostly just an update of the year in the copyright notices. It also includes whatever dependabot updates have come up since the last release. My development time continues to go into the ShinyShop branch, which I'm hoping to merge a first cut of at the next release.

November 2024: The 'Three Years Off Dead For Tax Reasons' Release

Sorry for the unexpected hiatus in releases. In my defence, I nearly died shortly after the last one.

TL;DR, I turn out to have a massive arteriovenous malformation very near my brain stem, which ruptured on 18 June 2021, causing a haemorrhagic stroke that nearly killed me. In hindsight, that probably explains the insomnia and headaches between 2019 and 2021... I thought they were 'just' work stress.

Anyway, I have been busy learning how to talk again, and then walk again, and then recovering from six months of hospital-food-induced starvation (mostly by eating properly once I was home again, but some exercise too) - so all-in-all, typing and coding have had to wait their turn. I'm getting there.

I don't think I've added or removed any features in this release, but there have been many many MANY gem updates - a lot of which were languishing in the dependabot queue while I recovered, and then more that flooded in once I cleared the initial backlog :)

June 2021: The 'Happy Birthday, Fliss!' Edition

Today is my flatmate's birthday! And it was either name the release for that, or call it 'the unemployed layabout release', as I finished working my notice on Friday and haven't quite sorted out the next job yet 😱

This month was mostly about finishing up the View Components work in the admin area that I started last month, although some other stuff happened along the way, as it does tend to. In particular, route partials got a complete rewrite, and feature plugin controllers/mailers/components no longer inherit common behaviour from core plugin Base classes (now they import it from core plugin Base modules instead - much better!) (I think!) 😝

Also I added an 'add element' feature to templates and templated content (pages and newsletter editions), something that power users have got a lot of mileage out of on the Perl version of ShinyCMS.

Shout out for the docs contributions from @paultcochrane this month; thanks Paul! 😃

As ever, there are more details in the release notes.

May 2021: The 'Component With A View' release

Relatively quiet month, especially compared to the last few! I'm in the process of quitting one job and finding the next, so that's taken a lot of my time and energy. I'm happy with the first pass at adding view components though, expect more of those next month...

Highlights for this release:

• Security updates: Rails and related Action* gems had a cluster of CVE fixes this month
• Added: [View Components][1], [mutant][3], config/initializers/shinycms.rb, flayignore, Blazer::ApplicationController, ... and more 🙂
• Updated:
  • Split main site DiscussionsController, creating CommentsController too
  • Accessibility fixes for the Halcyonic theme [PR #1088][5] [PR #1091][6] [PR #1112][7]
  • The host app's ApplicationController is now free of confusing Blazer gank
  • Lots of gem version bumps - including rubocop*, which required some code and config changes
• Removed: several packwerk todo files, the now-unneeded host app MainController, and all the admin menu partials that got replaced by view components 😃

There's a little bit more detail in the release notes, but this is the bulk of it - quiet month, as I say! The next few might be quiet too, as I get to grips with a new job and their codebase.

[1] https://github.com/github/view_component#readme
[2] #1096
[3] https://github.com/mbj/mutant#readme
[4] https://shinycms.org/blog/2021/04/cheat-codes
[5] #1088
[6] #1091
[7] #1112

April 2021: The 'Respecting Boundaries' release

Main addition (and cause of some fairly major code shuffling) in this release is Packwerk, to enforce plugin boundaries.

Also added routes partials, bullet (N+1 query detection), CodeClimate coverage reporting, and the Items extension for Pagy.

Plus lots of improvements to base controllers and mailers (now in the core plugin's app/public area), and moved Rails Email Preview engine, rubocop config, and ShinyCMS rake tasks, from main_app into the core plugin.