Backlight 3.2, the final major update within the Backlight 3 cycle, is now available.
Album publishing and presentation has been a major focus for our work during the 3.x cycle, and that work continues in Backlight 3.2 with the addition of direct upload capability for album cover and hero images. We previewed this feature in our last blog post, but here’s that video again.
This is my favorite new thing in Backlight 3.2, but it’s not the only thing!
New Font-size and Line-height controls are now available in the pangolin-page module. To find then, visit the Designer, then edit or create a page template using Pangolin Page. Open the “Content Areas” control group, and you will find separate controls under the “Main Copy” and “Pallets” section for setting the Font-size and Line-height in those areas.
We have streamlined Backlight’s Quick Setup for new installs. It is no longer required to create Guest credentials, and we now pre-generate a randomized API key for Lightroom’s Publisher, so that setup is no longer blocked on it.
For sharing albums and image permalinks to social media, the code from which previews are built has been overhauls. This yields some small improvement to previews displayed on Facebook and Twitter, and now ensures nice previews when sharing into Slack as well. Any other platform that builds such previews is also likely to benefit from these improvements.
Compatibility improvements have been made for the recently released PHP 8, ensuring continued site stability when hosts eventually, inevitably upgrade their servers (we’ve already seen this happening to some users).
Handling of GPS coordinates for images has been updated to support GPS seconds that are separated into own field, improving image location accuracy on maps.
The `backlight/custom` folder has been cleaned up, and we’ve moved the starter files into a new `custom-resources` module that can be installed and updated from the Backlight Modules page. Previously, new versions of these files had to be gotten by downloading Backlight’s installer again. This will make is easier for users interested in PHPlugins, and other extensibility features.
The JSON API libraries have been updated to support the `get_all_publisher_roots` endpoint via the `getRoot` method. See the updated API documentation for more information.
And yeah, you heard that right: there’s updated documentation.
Of course, as usual, this update also brings a variety of fixes for bugs and edge cases, smaller improvements throughout the application, and updates to various dependencies. The pangolin-page module has also received a lot of love in Backlight 3.2, albeit mostly under the hood; the module has undergone significant refactoring to ensure it’s continued health and longevity, and to help keep us sane as we press forward into future releases.
If that’s not enough for you, see the details changelogs from the Backlight Modules page of your admin.
As ever, updating to the latest version of Backlight is easy!
Backlight 3 users may install the update by visiting the Backlight Modules page in Backlight’s admin.
How-to: Installing Updates in Backlight
Users on Backlight 2, or legacy products – including Backlight and the CE4 series plugins for Lightroom – should contact me immediately to set up a discounted upgrade. Email me at mjcampagna at theturninggate dot net, or just reply to one of our newsletters.