New in Craft CMS 5.5

The Link field, three releases in

In August, I wrote that the Link field shipped without a label input, a target setting, or a class setting, and that a button label therefore meant a second field next to the first.

5.5 adds "Show the 'Label' field" and "Show the 'Open in a new tab' field." Not a free-form target attribute, a checkbox, which covers what editors actually need and nothing else. The class setting is still missing.

Worth noting how this has gone. The field arrived in 5.3. 5.4 added root-relative URLs and anchors and fixed a bug where TLDs longer than six characters were rejected. 5.5 adds the label and the tab checkbox, makes the allowed link types sortable, fixes URLs with non-ASCII characters, and makes translatable Link fields swap in the localized element when propagating to a new site. Three releases, three rounds of fixes, roughly one every four weeks.

The Title is just a field now

The "Show the Title field" entry type setting is gone. Instead, the Title element can be removed from the field layout, the way you'd remove anything else. Entry types can define a Default Title Format that applies even when the Title field is present, filling in a value if an editor leaves it blank. And you can now control whether the Title is required.

I regularly build entry types without a Title, so this one lands. The Title now behaves like any other element in the layout: you remove it if you don't need it, and a Default Title Format fills in a value if an editor leaves it blank.

It's a small change to the interface and a real one to the model. In Craft 4 the Title was structural. It's now a field layout element with a couple of extra settings.

Draft-based saving for nested elements

Saving a nested element in a Matrix or Addresses field in card view now writes to a draft of the owner element instead of publishing immediately. Nested element cards show status indicators when they're new or hold unpublished changes.

Card view was the gap here. Inline-editable blocks already began life as unpublished drafts in 5.3. This closes the other half: editing a card no longer silently pushes something live.

Range field

A new field type with a slider input for a value inside a defined range. Opacity, weighting, anything where a number input is technically fine and practically annoying. Number fields also get a "Step Size" setting.

Custom options for checkboxes and radio buttons

Checkboxes and Radio Buttons fields get an "Allow custom options" setting, letting editors add values alongside the predefined ones. The alternative used to be a Tags field, which brought a whole element type along for the ride.

Card attributes

Card views can now include native element attributes alongside custom fields, through new Card Attributes configurators. Post date, ID, that sort of thing, visible without opening the element.

Markdown in field layouts

There's a new Markdown UI element type for field layouts.

Last time out I called tips and warnings the addition I'd use most, and I meant it. This is the same idea with more room: a block of formatted text within the layout for cases where a one-line warning isn't enough. I haven't used it yet, and I'm not sure I will. The value of a tip is that it's short enough to read. A Markdown block is long enough to be ignored. That's where my handover documents always went to die, and moving them into the field layout doesn't obviously fix it.

Audio and video preview

Audio and video assets now have players on their Edit Asset screens. Useful when media is hosted in Craft rather than pushed to Vimeo or a podcast host.

Further down

The merge commands from 5.3 got a safety net: `fields/merge` and `fields/auto-merge` now prompt you to resave elements with relational fields first, and hand you a command to run on your other environments before deploying.

Sections no longer need unique names, matching what entry types got in 5.3. The update command takes `--except`, `--minor-only`, and `--patch-only`. There's a users/remove-2fa command, which you'll want the first time someone loses their phone. User impersonation now requires an elevated session.

And there's a substantial accessibility block: screen reader improvements across the control panel, better keyboard control, better contrast on required field indicators, and image focal points that can be moved without dragging.

Conclusion

Two things here matter beyond this release. The Link field is being fixed in public, on a visible schedule, and it still isn't done. And the Title has stopped being a special case, which continues what Craft 5 started when Matrix blocks became entries: fewer things in the system that follow their own rules.

Check the full changelog for everything not covered here.