Today’s release is a big milestone for Stacks 6. There’s still more to do before launch, but this is a solid step forward. Above is Isaiah's talk from the summit this past weekend. The Stacks Preview live stream that I did last month would be good to watch as well.
🛠️ Found a bug? Have feedback?
Instead of messaging Isaiah directly, please post in the Stacks Beta space. I’m staying up to speed on development and can help with most questions.
This keeps things organized and frees up Isaiah to stay focused on building the app, so we all get to the final release faster.
Announcement from Isaiah
At last, I have a beta to show everyone. Yes, it's still a beta, but with many more details filled in than last year. Keep reading below for some highlights.
There are some known bugs, of course. And still a few disabled buttons, but not too many anymore.
When you do bump into the inevitable bug, crash, or just something unexpected, please let us know. There's a link to the bug tracker below. That's the best way to ensure your issues get seen. I try to provide feedback on every one.
If you find that someone else has already reported your bug, feel free to add your own details. It really helps!
This build should auto-update from last year's beta (I'll switch the auto-update on later this evening), but if it doesn't or if there are problems, or if you'd just like to get it right now, just download with the link below.
Release Notes:
https://yourhead.com/appcast/Naia/release_notes_6.0.0_beta_39_6054
Bug Reporter:
https://gitlab.com/yourhead/stackspro/-/issues
Download:
https://yourhead.com/appcast/Naia/Stacks_6.0.0_beta_39_6054.zip
What's New
Fast Library Loading
The dreaded "Library Loading" bar is gone. Yeah!!!
With a new encryption library and better concurrency we can load the Stacks library about 200 times faster than before. That's not an exaggeration. It's crazy fast. Most folks with M1 or better machines will load even large libraries in a couple seconds.
What once took 20 seconds now happens in the blink of an eye.
What once took a painfully long minute, is now just seconds.
There is a small progress bar at the bottom of the library in case you have a monster library and a slower Mac. But don't worry, even if it takes a few seconds, you can get to work immediately while the library is still loading.
Theme Tab
Themes have their own tab in the Stack Library now and a new look. Note the little checkbox in the upper corner. That's the theme selected for your site. Double click to choose a new theme. The settings are in the Theme tab in Info Sidebar.
Stable Tabs
Way back in beta 10, the tabs in the info sidebar tended to "jump around" based on the context of what was selected. It was a tad confusing. Now we keep your selected tab on the screen no matter what else you're clicking on.
In some cases a double click will jump to the contextual tab (try double clicking on a theme in the theme tab of the Library.
Deploy
You can now upload your site directly via SFTP. With a simple, clear, and verifiable configuration, you can set up your host quickly. Then with just a couple clicks upload your site. Easy!
Theme API
There are SO MANY new additions to help with migrating themes from other platforms. This includes flexible template marker characters, support for hierarchical template folders, temporary variables, and a lot more. Watch this space for new docs and videos about all of those things.
More of the Stack API is available in the Theme API: the Libraries plist settings, files API, and all the various scoped templates.
There's more details to the Theme API language itself, like more color math, temporary variables, and lots more testing.
The Base Theme
The base theme is now much more modular and easier to reuse in your own themes. Inheriting the Base theme's templates allows you to skip all the boilerplate code and get right to building the fun parts of your theme. Or just take a few things and go full custom for the rest. It's totally up to you and built specifically to make theme design and migration simple.
Sample Theme
The sample theme has been cleaned up, simplified and now makes use of the base theme's modular templates by inheriting most of them and overriding a few. Plus it has more detailed inline comments to help theme designers understand the "why" behind each bit of code.
jQuery 3+ (and backward compatibility mode)
Supporting backward compatibility with older stacks that expect an older version of jQuery can be difficult -- but Stacks makes it easy. We now support two compatibility modes: modern-mode (default) and compatibility-mode. This allows us to offer complete backward compatibility even to some of the oldest stacks, while letting new Stacks and Themes use the new "jQuery" library request. And offers us a clear path forward towards jQuery 4 when it arrives.
Project Window
Just a nice little detail. The project window shows you your recent projects when there nothing else is open. It has quick buttons for creating a new project or opening an existing one. Thanks to Gary from DooBox for the nice SwiftUI design.
Theme Settings and Page Overrides
The theme tab now shows the site-wide theme settings. But you can choose an override theme for each page in the page settings of the info sidebar.
Much More
Last year many tabs and menu items were not stable enough and were left disabled. Now, nearly the entire app is enabled: The Library Group bar is back, Layouts can be Previewed, Deploy with SFTP, the Stack Updater window is back, a simple Site Settings tab, and a lot of little menu items and buttons are enabled.
Brand New Bugs
Yeah!? OK, fine. Not a good thing.
Bugs are no fun. I apologize in advance for confusing stuff, weird behavior, and crashing. It happens. That's the whole point of betas. But getting betas out to more folks helps us find bugs and get them fixed as fast as possible.
One More Thing
One final note (to anyone who has made it this far -- thank you for reading, I really appreciate it) -- we now have an integrated crash reporter. So if you get a crash, I get an immediate anonymous crash report notification to my phone and get to see all the nitty gritty details. If you'd like to post more details (like what you were doing when you saw the crash) then just post it to bug tracker. More details are always better, especially for crashes.
So grab a copy and break it as much as you can so we can and post everything to the bug tracker.
Have fun!