Apostrophe 4.25.0: Quality and Stability Improvements

[BoDonkey]

Hello Apostrophe Community!

Apostrophe 4.25.0 brings important quality improvements focused on data integrity and interface refinements as we continue work on larger features coming in early 2026.

Enhanced Data Quality for Form Fields

We've resolved an issue where the editing interface could display outdated options for select, radio, and checkboxes fields. Previously, if a developer removed choices from a field's schema, the interface might still show those invalid options for documents that had been saved with them. This fix ensures editors always see current, valid options, preventing confusion and maintaining data integrity across your content.

Quality of Life Improvements

When a widget area reaches its configured maximum number of widgets, the "Add Content" button now properly disables, providing clearer feedback to editors about content limits. This small refinement helps prevent confusion when areas reach capacity.

Advanced Permission Enhancements

For teams using the Advanced Permission extension, we've added support for permission.isAdmin overrides, providing more flexibility in permission configuration. Additionally, the Multisite Dashboard now correctly displays all sites to admin users when privateDashboards is enabled, reflecting admins' actual access permissions.

Under the Hood

This release includes updates to our caching infrastructure that address edge cases in multi-locale deployments and improve error handling, ensuring more reliable performance across different hosting environments.

Community Contributions: First MCP Server for Apostrophe

We're excited to see @andrewmat32 create the first Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for ApostropheCMS. The apostrophe-cms-generator provides Claude Code with the ability to generate basic project infrastructure, schemas, and templates for Apostrophe projects.

While this initial implementation focuses on foundational capabilities, it represents an important step in making Apostrophe more accessible through AI-powered development tools. We're grateful to see community members exploring new ways to work with Apostrophe and look forward to seeing how MCP integrations evolve.

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These improvements are ready for you to explore! Update your projects with npm update and let us know what you think on our roadmap.

🚀 Happy coding!

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Apostrophe 4.25.0

Adds

• If you want production sourcemaps to be created but not actually uploaded for the public, you can combine productionSourceMaps: true with the new productionSourceMapsDir option to specify an alternate location where the @apostrophecms/asset:build task should place them. By using this option, you take responsibility for delivering the sourcemaps to their final home. Creating and/or erasing the folder between builds is also up to you. Most people will not need this option.
• Adds support for context utility admin bar items to display a label and omit an icon

Fixes

• Fixes an issue where the frontend was caching stale choices for select, radio and checkboxes fields that were saved but no longer valid (i.e removed from the schema).
• When we reach the max in a widget area, the Add Content button is now disabled.
• Fix getManagerOf to log an error and return undefined instead of throwing for unsupported metaTypes

Changes

• Bumped dependency on express-cache-on-demand to guarantee installation of recent fixes for edge cases that could share a response between two locales of a single-site project, report errors without a process restart, and correctly handle res.send('') with an empty string.
• Restores relative import paths inside Vite-generated entrypoints on *nix builds so dev server HMR works again, while keeping the Windows-specific absolute path workaround.
• The productionSourceMaps option is now fully supported in both Vite and Webpack. Previously this feature did not work fully in Vite, and was not supported with Webpack. Enabling this feature completes the task of making sourcemaps fully available in the browser in production.
• Relationship input's autocomplete list now positioned with floating-ui

Pro Modules

@apostrophecms-pro/advanced-permission 3.0.6

This module provides more granular control over content permission. It allows the creation of custom groups with proscribed abilities and the ability to assign users to as few or as many groups as desired. Users and groups can also be assigned per-document and per-locale permissions allowing for fine control of who can edit and publish any document. Explore our documentation to learn how this extension can enhance your project. Once you’re ready, obtain a license and install it through Apostrophe Workspaces. For further details or inquiries, feel free to contact us or visit our pricing page.

Adds

• Adds permission.isAdmin override.

@apostrophecms-pro/multisite-dashboard 1.5.1

This extension creates the new default multisite dashboard with infinite scroll, search functionality, and the ability to save templates. This extension requires that the project also have the @apostrophecms-pro/multisite extension installed and configured. Explore our documentation to discover how this extension can enhance your project. For further details or inquiries, feel free to contact us or visit our pricing page.

Fixes

• Dashboard-level Admins have always had the ability to modify all sites via the API. Starting with this release, the dashboard correctly reflects this by displaying all sites to admins even if privateDashboards: true is in use.

Free modules

@apostrophecms/import-export 3.5.1

This module enables import and export of pages and pieces, with or without related documents such as files, images and other related types.

Fixes

• Fixes possible infinite loop when getting related types by storing processed widgets.

@apostrophecms/login-totp 1.3.3

This login verification module adds a TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password) check when any user logs into the site, compatible with Google Authenticator or any TOTP app.
When activated, it will ask unregistered users to add a token to their app through a QR code. Once done, it will ask users to enter the code provided by their app after the initial login step.

Changes

• Bumps eslint-config-apostrophe to 5, fixes errors, removes unused dependencies.

Utilities

express-cache-on-demand 1.0.4 (2025-12-01)

Express middleware providing "on demand" caching that kicks in only when requests arrive simultaneously.

• Default hash function now distinguishes requests by hostname, and respects req.originalUrl in preference to req.url if available (ApostropheCMS).
• Passing the empty string to res.send() no longer causes a failure.
• If express-cache-on-demand does fail due to an unsupported way of ending a response, just issue a 500 error and log a useful message. Don't terminate the process.