# Apostrophe 4.27.0: Floating Widget Editor and Styles Editor Now Stable

[BoDonkey]

Hello Apostrophe Community!

Apostrophe 4.27.0 introduces a redesigned widget editing experience with a flexible interface, graduates the Styles Editor from beta to stable, and adds support for right-to-left languages.

Watch the release feature video

Floating Widget Editor: Edit Without Obstruction

The widget editor has been redesigned to allow content managers to move, resize, and position it anywhere on the screen. This addresses two longstanding challenges in content editing: the widget editor modal blocking your view of the content you're editing and developer intervention being required just to resize it.

The new windowed editor can be:

• Moved to any position on screen, keeping your content visible while you edit
• Resized to show more or fewer options at once
• Docked back to the traditional centered position when preferred

This improvement affects all widget types, making it easier to see how your changes affect the page layout in real time. The flexible positioning is particularly valuable when working with widget styles, where seeing the visual result while adjusting design options helps editors make better choices faster. Note: When working on a widget that's nested, the original sidebar view will open to avoid multiple floating windows.

Styles Editor: Now Stable

Our new Styles Editor, introduced in beta last month, is now production-ready. This feature provides visual style editing for both site-wide design tokens and per-widget style variations, moving capabilities previously available only in the Pro Palette extension into open-source core.

If you tested the Styles Editor during the beta period, thank you for your feedback. The module is now stable and ready for production use. For teams currently using Palette, migration to Styles remains straightforward via the provided migrate-to-styles task.

See Styles in Action

Want to see the feature in a real implementation? Our new public demo at demo.apostrophecms.com showcases both global and per-widget styles in a production-ready configuration. As we streamline our starter kit offerings, the public demo project represents our current recommendation for getting started with ApostropheCMS. The demo It features a comprehensive implementation of styling patterns you can adapt for your own sites.

You can explore the demo online or fork the code on GitHub to examine how global design tokens and widget style variations work together in practice:

• apostrophecms/public-demo - Traditional full-stack implementation
• apostrophecms/astro-public-demo - Headless implementation with Astro

Right-to-Left Language Support

Projects serving content in right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew can now configure text direction at the locale level. The new direction property in locale configuration controls content directionality, while the slugDirection option manages URL slug formatting.

Individual schema fields can override the locale-level direction setting when needed, allowing for precise control in multilingual projects. Note that while content editing supports RTL text, the admin UI layout itself remains left-to-right.

AI Helper Updates

AI Helper, an experimental extension that provides AI-powered image generation and text content creation, has been refactored to use a provider-based architecture. This experimental module now supports multiple AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini, with a clear path for developers to add custom providers.

The extension remains in beta as we refine AI integration patterns that will eventually inform core ApostropheCMS features. Teams using AI Helper should expect ongoing refinement to the provider system. We welcome feedback on this approach as we explore AI capabilities within the platform.

Improved Internationalization

The new intlMapping option in locale configuration allows projects to map custom locale codes to standard ones for JavaScript's Intl API. This is particularly useful when your locale naming doesn't align with standard Intl.DateTimeFormat locales — for example, mapping your custom code to en-GB for British English formatting.

CLI Support for Hybrid Projects

The Apostrophe CLI now properly detects and handles hybrid ApostropheCMS + Astro projects with a backend/ directory structure. The create command will set up these projects correctly, though the add command is not yet supported in hybrid contexts.

Additionally, the CLI now validates project shortName values to prevent potential security issues, restricting names to letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores.

Additional Improvements

This release includes several refinements:

• Safer Image Handling: Image and attachment helpers no longer throw errors, preventing display issues when media references become invalid
• Rich Text Rendering: Fixed a bug where rich text images and permalinks weren't properly rendered in external frontend frameworks like Astro
• Layout Column Help Text: Clarified the breakpoints option (now labelBreakpoints) and added a showBreakpointsHelp option to control help text visibility

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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 4.27.0

Adds

• Adds the intlMapping option to locale configuration to map custom locale codes to standard ones for Intl usage. This property is available in apos.i18n.locales for project-level code.
• In @apostrophecms/i18n add direction property to locale configuration to support RTL languages (e.g., he, ar), slugDirection option to control default direction of slug fields. Add direction property in the schema field definitions to override and validate text direction (supports ltr and rtl) of input fields. Note that the admin UI layout and labels overall are still LTR only for now, but these changes accommodate editing RTL locale content within that. For best results the feature should be combined with adminLocales and defaultAdminLocale module options, e.g. the admin UI itself should remain in English or another LTR language for now.
• Fix hardcoded help text in Layout Column fields. Rename the existing breakpoints option to labelBreakpoints for clarity. The old option is deprecated but still supported for BC reasons. Add new showBreakpointsHelp option (default true). If set to false, the "Show tablet/mobile" fields help text will be removed from the UI.
• Adds windowed view to widget editor
• Added support for translation interpolation for schema fields in the UI via labelInterpolation and helpInterpolation schema properties.

Changes

• Relax the image- and attachment-related Nunjucks helpers, they should never throw.

Fixes

• Fix a bug where rich text images and permalinks are not properly rendered in public external front (e.g. Astro) views.

Pro Modules

@apostrophecms-pro/document-versions 2.7.0

This module automatically creates versions for your published documents (pages and pieces) and allows manual restore to any previously saved document version. Explore our documentation to discover how this extension can enhance your project. Then, effortlessly integrate it through our new Apostrophe Workspaces. For further details or inquiries, feel free to contact us or visit our pricing page.

Adds

• Adds support for the core intlMapping property in @apostrophecms/i18n locale configuration. This allows setting the Intl.DateTimeFormat locale (e.g., en-GB) directly in the locale configuration, taking precedence over the module-level localeMapping.
• Deprecates the localeMapping option in favor of the standard intlMapping property in @apostrophecms/i18n configuration. A warning will be logged if localeMapping is used.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the document versions list would sometimes fail to trigger infinite scrolling when the initial set of items was too short to create a scrollbar.

@apostrophecms-pro/multisite-dashboard 1.6.0

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.

Adds

• Adds support for the optional intlMapping locale property, allowing a different locale code for date and number formatting.
• Locale direction support in site piece.

Free modules

@apostrophecms/ai-helper 1.0.0-beta.11

This module enhances Apostrophe with AI-driven helpers. Currently this module offers:

• A button to generate an image from a text prompt via OpenAI and generate variations of that newly created image.
• An insert menu option to generate rich text from a prompt via OpenAI.

See the extension page for more info.

Adds

• Refactored to use provider files
• Added provider files for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini
• Updated README to reflect new options
• Updated image variation modal to take a second prompt
• Added a skill file for creating custom providers
• Updates README with beta info

@apostrophecms/apostrophe-astro 1.9.0

This module integrates ApostropheCMS into your Astro application.

Adds

• Handle correctly HEAD page requests
• Add RTL support for Astro applications

@apostrophecms/form 1.5.3

Allow ApostropheCMS editors to build their own forms. They can then place any form in one or more content areas across the website.

Adds

• Adds an accept attribute to the form-file-field-widget to limit user file choices based on the @apostrophecms/attachment module fileGroups

Fixes

• Corrects attachment code example

Utilities

@apostrophecms/cli 3.6.0

The Apostrophe CLI is a cross-platform starting point for creating and configuring ApostropheCMS projects, providing a simple boilerplate generator and wrapping other useful functions into an easy to use command line tool.

Adds

• Support for hybrid ApostropheCMS + Astro projects in the create command. Projects with a backend/ directory are automatically detected and handled appropriately.
• Updated the default Astro starter example in the README to use astro-public-demo.
• Validates the shortName argument in the create command to only allow letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores, preventing potential command injection.

Fixes

• The add command now displays an error when run inside a hybrid Astro project, as it is not currently supported in that context.

Changes

• The default starter kit is now public-demo

sanitize-html 2.17.1

This module provides a simple HTML sanitizer with a clear API.

Changes

• Fix unclosed tags (e.g., <hello) returning empty string in escape and recursiveEscape modes. Fixes #706. Thanks to Byeong Hyeon for the fix.