New in Craft CMS 1.1

New installer

The installation process has been updated and now includes an illustration by Paul Burton of Vile, Inc. The installer also checks your browser's language and automatically switches to the correct translation if it's available.

Tags

Craft now has a fifth official element type: tags. Like entries, users, assets, and globals, tags have their own field type and can be added to entry types, files, users, and more. Each tag set also has its own field layout.

You can now access tags in templates with craft.tags, just like craft.entries and craft.assets. The getNext() and getPrev() functions now work for tags, entries, users, and assets. There's also a new ids() function to get the IDs of all elements in a query.

Assets improvements

In version 1.1, you can upload files directly from asset fields. You can also edit asset content by double-clicking the file. By default, assets now get a title automatically based on the filename.

You can now access assets directly in templates with craft.assets, just like craft.entries and craft.users.

Multi-environment support

Craft now has better support for multiple development environments. You can define arrays in the config file for settings specific to each environment. 

Previously, you had to hardcode site URLs and file paths for each environment. The new environmentVariables config setting makes this easier. You can set different key-value pairs for each environment:

    'environmentVariables' => [
'baseUrl' => 'http://example.com',
]

Instead of entering a full URL in the admin, baseUrlassets/ now does the job. Craft expands it to http://example.com/assets/ on the frontend, and each environment can have its own baseUrl defined in the config.

In version 1.1, Craft now recognizes templates with the .twig extension as well as .html. There's also a new Twig filter called shuffle, which lets you display elements in a collection in random order.

To see all 60 changes in Craft 1.1, check out the official release notes.

My take

Craft 1.1 doesn't reinvent anything, but it addresses several things that were genuinely missing.  Tags add a missing element type, multi-environment support makes daily development easier, and direct template access to assets was long overdue.

Still, the quick release pace raises a question. Craft 1.0 shipped in June, and 1.1 came out at the end of July. It causes you to wonder whether 1.0 might have been better served by waiting a few more months, until something like Matrix was ready.