7.4.0 Preview: Cool Things You Didn’t Know You Need
2/1/2024 / By Robin Sowell
Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest impacts. ExpressionEngine 7.4.0 adds many of those hidden gems. Here we’ll celebrate the small touches that you may not know you want, yet find you can’t live without. Well, you could, but you’d be less happy. And we want you to be happy!
Show field short names on the entry page
This is one I find myself using all the time when debugging or setting up new templates. You’re working in the entry publisher and need to know the field short name on the fly? Now there’s a setting to display those field short names on the publish page.
Edit file metadata on the fly
Another feature you won’t know how you lived without, is the ability to add or edit file metadata straight from the entry publisher when you add your image. It’s another big time saver when you’re in data entry mode!
Just click the metadata button:
And the metadata is yours to command:
View and edit source code in the CKEditor
OK, everyone who uses the CKEditor option for their Rich Text Editor (RTE) fields already knew they needed this one. In 7.4.0, there’s a button to view and edit the source code. Kudos to the CKEditor team for making that possible!
More control over forms attributes
ExpressionEngine’s approach to creating forms via tags keeps things simple and secure and it has always been easy to add classes and IDs. But great designers may need more than that to fully realize their designs. This implementation keeps things safe, while allowing HTML attributes to be passed through as form parameters. You can limit the attributes you want to allow via the form_attributes.php configuration file.
{exp:email:form data-automobile_type="ford"}
Results in:
<span class="hljs-tag"><<span class="hljs-name">form</span> <span class="hljs-attr">data-automobile_type</span>=<span class="hljs-string">"ford"</span> <span class="hljs-attr">etc...</span>></span>
This community driven addition shows the designers touch from start to finish and the final form owes special thanks to @jcogs-design, @albuvee and @litzinger.
Prettier fields in Channel Entry forms
The frontend channel entry form has always been flexible with regard to how fields are displayed, but sometimes you want to just use a {field:name} tag or a channel entry loop and have everything look pretty right off the bat. 7.4.0 polishes up the default display of the fields. Now a toggle looks like a toggle out of the box!
Require a category or limit category to 1 selection
The category system has always been versatile, allowing nesting, multiple category groups, and easy navigation using the assigned categories. But sometimes an entry should have 1 and only 1 category selected. That’s easy to do in 7.4.0, with a per category group setting for each channel. You can now limit categories to a single selection and/or require a category to be selected via the channel settings and you’re golden.
