Contao 5.2.0 released

Metadata support for images

Contao now recognizes and extracts the metadata of images. This results in two new features.

1. Show metadata of the images

You can display the metadata contained in each image. To do so, open the file manager and click on the "blue info icon" for an image.

2. Keep copyright fields

When generating the various image sizes, you can specify which metadata should be retained. Especially in the context of copyright, this setting may even be indispensable for certain images. You can define the metadata settings for the central image size.

Set image quality

Up until now, the image quality could only be configured centrally via config.yml. It was automatically applied for all image sizes in the entire system. Now you can not only override the image quality in the config.yml per image size, the setting has also found its way into the back end where - thanks to a new setting - the image quality can now be selected as a percentage with a value between 0 and 100.

Edit image sizes via Lightbox

This is a usability improvement. The definition of a central image size can now be edited directly in the content element through a practical pop-up. This saves you the detour via the layout and allows you to make changes more quickly.

Accordion without jQuery

Contao has already converted numerous components in the back end to vanilla JS. In this release, the accordion element in the front end has been extended with an additional template based on Handorgel.js. The best part is that Handorgel.js no longer depends on jQuery or MooTools.

To use this feature, it is necessary to activate the JavaScript template js_accordion via the layout.

Root folder visible in file manager

To improve orientation for back end users with limited access rights, the folder structure in the file manager is now displayed completely. So now you see the corresponding parent mount point and not only the single shared folder.

Improvement in accessibility

From now on, all status icons used to directly activate and deactivate as well as publish and unpublish elements have a label that depends on the status of the respective element. This increases the compatibility with screen readers and improves the accessibility of Contao.

News and Events pass primaryImageOfPage

If a news or event entry contains a teaser image, the primaryImageOfPage is added to the corresponding schema.org data.

Contao's internal search engine can also handle this data and displays the corresponding teaser image on the results page when searching for news or events.

Standardization of the templates

Certain templates had an additional div wrapper around the form fields, which made it difficult to design consistently using CSS. These wrappers have been removed.

New insert tag system

The system for insert tags has been redesigned and implemented. Little changes in the handling for the user, but in the background it brings numerous advantages.

In particular, security and extensibility have been improved. Core insert tags can now be overwritten if necessary. The caching of certain insert tags (e.g. {{date::Y}}) has also been improved.

Create modules and content elements directly in Twig templates

Thanks to the new Twig functions frontend_module and content_element, it is now possible to create modules and content elements directly in Twig templates without the need for a database entry. This means that no configuration is required in the back end at all!

Further improvements in the changelog

A complete list of all changes can be found in the changelog at the end of this blog post. Also worth reading is the official release article on contao.org and watching the YouTube video of the Contao Academy.