N.B. This release includes some updates to our theming engine. If you have customized your own Vanilla theme and applied custom CSS, please see the Theming Engine Changes section of these notes.
Schedule
Release 2021.001 will be released:
- To staging sites Tuesday, January 12th 2021
- To production sites Monday, January 18th 2021
- To Enterprise clients Monday, January 25th 2021
Advanced Theming
Vanilla releases 2020.001 - 2020.006 will have a strong focus on improving the advanced theming capabilities of our Foundation theme and our theme editor.
This release brings the first step of that, with a new "Advanced Settings" section of the theme editor. This brings a JSON variable editor and inline documentation for 100s of variables that are not currently included in the visual user interface. Undocumented variables can also be used here and more documentation will be added in the future.
The Advanced Variables Panel
Open the variables panel by clicking on the new "Advanced Settings' button at the bottom of the theme editor. Changes made in this new menu will sync back and forth between the visual editor and the advanced editor.
Inline Documentation
Inline autocomplete and documentation has been added for the following sets of variables:
banner titleBar userContent
By typing any of these you should see the full set of documented variables for those components appear.
Upcoming Documentation
We are hard at work on a new and improved version of our theme guide, which will include written guides as well as a theme API reference with all documented variables (the same ones with autocomplete and descriptions in the theme editor).
Additionally we are currently working on variable documentation for the following components:
globalsearchResult buttonhomeWidgetevents
Theming Engine Changes
This release contained some internal refactoring of the styling engine in order to improve stability and reduce chances of future regressions. In order to complete this refactoring the way various CSS class names are generated has changed.
Some site owners and developers may have notice that various new foundation components, like the Title Bar, Banner, Events module, and more had some seemingly randomized characters at the end of their CSS classes. (For example .titleBarNav-navigation_f45h). These classes are not stable to apply CSS to, and the recommended way to adjust their appearance is through the variables for their associated components.
In this release the format of these CSS class names are changing slightly. That same component will now have a CSS class name in a format similar to .vanilla-579lyi-titleBarNav-navigation.
This brings a couple of recommendations:
- Any sites that are currently styling on these types of classes should test this release on their staging environment. You may need to update your CSS.
- If possible, try to use the variables for these components (which now have inline documentation in the theme editor).
- If you still must style on the CSS class, be aware that the hash after
vanilla may change in a future release. You should change your CSS selectors to reflect this. For example using [class*="titleBar-navigation"] instead of of .vanilla-579lyi-titleBarNav-navigation. - Be aware that features are actively being added to these types of components that can be easily and safely controlled through the documented theme variables. You may need to validate your CSS again in future releases if the structure of the component changes to accommodate new features or bug fixes.
Post Statuses on Search
This release includes an update to our new search page and search API that allows us to expose the post status on search results and on search autocomplete.
New Webhook Events
With this release we have added the follow webhook Events:
- Reactions
- Answer: to keep track of changes to Q&A status changes
Bug Fixes & Enhancements
Backported fixes
The following fixes have been added to Release 2021.001
