Quick update on UIBUILDER v7.6 progress, new Markdown Content Management feature!

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Hi all, thought it was high-time I shared what is happening with UIBUILDER.

As some of you may be aware, I've suffered some eye problems this autumn so I've not been able to get as much done. But things are happening. Sadly, I'll probably not get a new release out before Christmas but at least I can share progress.

There are a couple of important new features to highlight:

  • When going into the Editor after a new version of UIBUILDER has been installed, we now have the option to show a highlight summary of changes.

  • There will be a new node, uib-markweb. This has a very simple configuration, just a folder (relative to the userDir) and a URL path.

    The idea behind this is to be able to very simply create a file-based content management system, not dissimilar to Docsify which UIBUILDER's documentation currently uses. But, obviously, a fully Node-RED solution. (with help from UIBUILDER of course!)

    The folder will need to contain any number of markdown files and sub-folders, all of which will be made available at the url and rendered from Markdown to HTML using the marked library (that Node-RED also uses).

    There will be an option to have an HTML wrapper to make things look nice and that can, of course, have CSS styling.

    Marked extensions will be allowed as well and will be automatically mounted.

    Not in the initial release, but in the future, there will be features for automatic menus/navigation and dynamic data. Also for the future, I will make the libraries available to the uibuilder front-end so they can be used there as well as in Node-RED.

    I've been meaning to work on something like this for a long time and I think a lot of people may find it useful even if they aren't using uibuilder itself. It should be great for documentation sites and even simple blogs or other news sites with minimal effort and no build-steps required.

Other updates already completed:

  • Improvements to the performance of the uib-cache node allowing much higher throughput.
  • Some improvements to the documentation, with collapsible sidebar sections and some bug fixes.
  • In the brand css, a new class visually-hidden which is ideal for input labels that you don't need sighted people to see but you do need for screen-readers. Also a fix for the fieldset border.
  • In the client library, I've added a high-resolution timing value to inbound messages to enable measuring of latency and performance.
  • In the back-end code, there are some security improvements.
  • In GitHub, I now have just 2 branches, main is the release code and dev is the next development version. Both of those will continue to be around and so I won't be changing to new dev branches all the time. This should make it much easier for people who like to try out the upcoming features.

As always, the changelog and the "next" documents always have a lot more detail.

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