Milestone M36 - enhanced category and theme management, instant publishing, draft access and more

Let's go through what we got done in Milestone M36 (May05 - May18).

New Features & Improvements 🚀

✅ Simplified category management with tree view

Managing categories is now easier. You can create, update and move articles between categories directly from the article page, without visiting the admin panel’s categories page. Articles in the same category are grouped like folders and categories are displayed as a tree in the sidebar. This helps keep things organized and speeds up your workflow.

✅ Theme management improvements

A help popover linking to the themes page help article was added next to the "Themes" title. A new plus icon was also added at the top for cloning system themes. The spacing between the "Save Changes" and "Cancel" buttons was adjusted to prevent flickering. The back button behavior was fixed to ensure it returns to the correct screen.

✅ Performance optimization

Improved database indexing to speed up queries, reduce lookup times and make data retrieval faster.

✅ Header and footer page improvements

A help popover linking to the header and footer help article was added next to the "Header and Footer" title. Previously, it was possible to create multiple header and footer links with the same label, which caused confusion. This issue is now fixed by adding validations on both the front end and back end to prevent duplicate labels.

✅ Publish now with a single click

Moved the “Publish Later” option to the three-dot menu, allowing articles to be published instantly with a single click. Previously, clicking “Publish” required choosing between “Publish Now” or “Publish Later” from a separate pane, but now publishing can be done instantly with one click.

✅ Easy access to draft version

The draft version of articles can now be accessed by anyone with the URL, without requiring login. This fix improves collaboration by making drafts easier to share and review.

Bug Fixes ⚒️

✅ Fixed 404 errors

Resolved a race condition that sometimes caused 404 errors when creating or updating an article slug.

✅ Fixed emoji selection issue

Emojis used to disappear when clicked, making them hard to select. This is fixed and selecting emojis works smoothly now.

✅ Fixed title field translation

Fixed the incorrect translation of the title field in the SEO settings pane.

✅ Fixed preview search logging

Searches made on the preview page were incorrectly logged in reports. This issue is now fixed and preview searches are no longer recorded.