🏃 5.1 release makes Bolt faster and brings write API to life
Hey there, Bolt Community 👋
Orders of magnitude faster
Exciting news for your Bolt websites: the newest 5.1 release runs not one but two orders of magnitude faster. Creating and managing content has never before taken so little server time. This is a major improvement in the user experience for content editors, which the Core team is excited to deliver to all Bolt 5 websites.
Is this another good opportunity to roll up sleeves and upgrade your Bolt 3 site? Make sure to check out the upgrade blueprint explaining how to do this as easy as it gets.
Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) content with Bolt's API
Bolt 5.1 also arrives with a fully fleshed out API that now supports write operations (create, update and delete) for your content. Any external software, be that an event management platform or a client CRM can communicate with Bolt. The API provides both REST and GraphQL endpoints for maximum flexibility of your favourite tech stack.
Additional enhancements
In addition to the two major features of the release, we are releasing a number of smaller enhancements:
- Developers can override how fields are displayed in the backend #2929
- Prefix and postfix for relations #2990
- More details in the Bolt Logger #2913
As usual, we also included a number of bugfixes and reductions in technical debt.
How to update?
Simply run composer update in your project folder and read the terminal output :-)
Happy building 🛠
Tell us a little bit of what the core team has been up to
We've been working on a lot of projects using Bolt for clients. This is giving us new insights, that are easy to overlook. Working on a real-world project gives you a whole different perspective on things, than if you're working on it just because you feel a specific topic or feature is important.
Why is the improvement to Bolt's load speed important?
In the front-end it's important, because the quicker you can show a page to a visitor, the lower the bouncerate will be. In the backend, the difference is particularly noticeable on pages where a lot of Relationships are loaded.
How can the new API help designers, content creators and website users in their experience?
Now that we've added write-capabilities to the API, we've obviously had to make sure it works well with authentication. This means a more fine-grained control how you can expose access to the content for 'consumers' of the API. And obviously, the other way around as well: You can now have trusted sources directly add content into a Bolt Site.
What is the "small improvement" in the 5.1 release that you like most?
To be honest? Probably some of the oft-requested features that are now available as extensions to all users: An extension to edit your menus using drag'n'drop, and a better search engine that supports fuzzy matching and boolean search.