Two weeks ago we revealed Visual Open Authoring on the TinaCMS website and we have been working hard to make this feature available for everyone.

Since most of the development for Open Authoring was done directly in the tinacms.org repository itself some house keeping is in order. We changed the theming system to be more compatible with inline editing, started moving over our new blocks, and started refactoring tinacms to better accommodate the new Toolbar UI. To help make this process smoother, Jeff created the @tinacms/webpack-helpers package to make it easy to test changes to tinacms from outside the monorepo.

This week the TinaCMS core team will continue down the path towards Open Authoring for everyone. We will be doing some refactoring in tinacms.org and looking into how the Toolbar UI will relate to the Sidebar in order to get a better idea of what packages and guides we will need to create. We're also exploring ways to introduce a versioned API reference for all the tinacms/tinacms packages.

If you're interested in getting involved then jump into the #dev channel in the TinaCMS Slack group or take a look through the list of open issues.

Enhancements

@tinacms/styles

• theming is done using CSS custom properties

react-tinacms-inline

• Improved Blocks UI: See the PR for more details
• New Component: BlockImage lets users add images to blocks.

gatsby-tinacms-git:

• Delete Action: a generic form action that works for both json and markdown

Refactoring

The following packages were created as part of the tinacms refactoring. Extracting these packages makes it easier to build custom interfaces for TinaCMS. Most people will not need to use these directly.

• New Package: @tinacms/react-modals
• New Package: @tinacms/alerts
• New Package: @tinacms/react-alerts
• New Package: @tinacms/media

Contributing

New Package: @tinacms/webpack-helpers

Linking apps to a monorepo can be tricky. Tools like npm link are buggy and introduce inconsistencies with module resolution. If multiple modules rely on the same package you can easily end up with multiple instances of that package, this is problematic for packages like react which expect only one instance. If your app uses webpack you can get around these issues by ensuring that your dependencies come from a specific path on your system. This is especially helpful for working on the TinaCMS monorepo while using its packages in your app. @tinacms/webpack-helpers makes it easy to set up.

Checkout the README to learn how to develop TinaCMS with your website.

Contributors

Thanks to everyone for contributing.

GitHub Milestones

Checkout the GitHub Milestone for all the details on this weeks release!