New in Craft CMS 4.4
Author Experience
The most significant visible change is reworking the Assets indexes, where subfolders are now displayed directly above the files instead of in the sidebar as dropdown boxes. There is also now a breadcrumb navigation that shows the current folder path. Additional folders can be created within the breadcrumb menu with a click. Customers like the drag-and-drop capabilities of the assets section, as it reminds them of their operating system. Fortunately, Pixel & Tonic has improved this feature, as files and folders can now be dragged simultaneously, and accidental dragging is said to have been reduced. I have yet to be able to test the latter.
Structure view mode
Structure sections and category groups now have their view mode to hierarchically display their entries/categories. Just click one of two buttons: Either the option is enabled, which shows the contents in a structured table, or the standard table view is enabled.
Entry revisions
A "View all revisions" option is displayed for entries containing more than ten revisions, and clicking on it opens a page listing all revisions.
Rules for dynamic relationship conditions
Relationship condition rules stored in the project configuration now support dynamic Twig templates that output the ID of the associated element. So, you can build filters in the admin that output the Entry type Standard Links section if the author has set the Twig template {{currentUser.id}}. It is important to note that the Twig template outputs an ID. More examples can be found here.
Development
Developers are happy about some minor new features. For example, a letterbox effect can now be added to image transformations. Select the Letterbox mode in the image transformations and enter a fill color as a hexadecimal number.
Furthermore, all variable dumps now use Symfony VarDumper. Additionally, a new Twig tag {% dump %} sends the variable dumps directly to the debug toolbar.
Entrification
Craft 4.4 is the first step of the entrification, and the process should be completed with Craft 6.0. In short, categories and keywords will be abolished in the medium term. Instead, category groups will become structures, keyword groups will become channel sections, and global content will become single sections. The plans have been discussed long in advance, so Craftentries has been replacing native categories with Structures for at least 1.5 years. I've been using this method in customer projects ever since.
However, moving from Categories to Structures can be stressful for legacy projects with hundreds of categories that have grown over the years. So it's nice that Craft 4.4 adds new CLI commands that convert category groups, tag groups, and global sets, along with their contents, to Structures, Channels, and Singles. The fields, categories, and tags are also converted to entries.
Fields for entries linked to a structure section get a new "Keep hierarchy" setting that makes them behave like category fields - when you link a nested entry, all its predecessors are linked as well.
Last, a new configuration setting retrieves all singles for Twig templates by a handle. This setting makes singles behave the same as the previous global content, and this option has been the default setting since Craft 4.4.
Related Links
Conclusion
Craft 4.4 is an excellent new release, which on the one hand, offers improvements in the user interface and, on the other hand, sets the course for the future. Entrification and the accompanying simplification of categories/tags/global content are overdue. It's nice that the first developer tools are now available to make the changeover easier, and especially that singles now behave like global content is a huge relief.
I also welcome the revision of the asset index view. The day before Craft 4.4 was released, I had another training session with a customer and showed them how to create the subfolders. I also demonstrated how drag-and-drop moves files around in the process, and something unintentionally went wrong. So I hope that accidental drags do happen less often from 4.4. I also like the new UI of the folders because the subfolders are now always visible - like in the operating system - and not hidden via dropdown. The breadcrumb navigation is also plausible, so the customer only has to be told that he can create further subfolders via it.
I like minor new features, like the ability not to have warnings and tooltips pop up repeatedly for a user and the more evident switch between structure and table view in the element indexes of Structures.
Craft continues to evolve in the right direction, and I'm excited to see what changes will be integrated into the CMS before Craft 5.
