What's new since version 8.79?

The latest major release is 8.106.0. Here is a focused summary of the main features introduced since Cecil 8.79.0.

Improved developer experience and performance visibility

• Build progress indicator (8.101.0): build execution now exposes a progress bar, making long-running operations easier to follow.
• Extended metrics output (8.101.0): metrics now include a total duration row with comparisons between runs, which helps track performance changes over time.
• Raw timings and diff metrics (8.87.0): build metrics now expose raw timings and diffs, making regressions and improvements easier to identify.
• Build/cache identifier improvements (8.80.x): build IDs are exposed and integrated into cache logic, with updated hashing behavior for better cache consistency.

Better template rendering

• Dark-mode image variant support (8.95.0): templates can now handle dedicated image variants for dark mode, improving visual adaptation. (docs)
• layouts.autoescape option (8.97.0): this setting provides finer control over template escaping behavior. (docs)
• Translation disabled inside code blocks (8.98.0): inline and fenced code are no longer translated, which helps preserve technical content accurately.
• cache_key Twig helper (8.88.0): templates can generate explicit cache keys for more predictable cache behavior. (docs)

Content and image pipeline improvements

• Front matter menu name support (8.90.0): menu entries can now define a dedicated name property. (docs)
• libvips image driver support (8.91.0): image processing can now use libvips as a driver option. (docs)
• Localized Markdown image assets (8.92.0): image assets can now be localized for translated pages. (docs)

Quality and diagnostics tooling

• New doctor command (8.103.0): a dedicated diagnostics command was introduced to make project issues easier to identify. (docs)
• New doctor:seo command (8.105.0): a dedicated SEO audit command was added with matching documentation and tests. (docs)

Better development workflow

• Background serve mode and stop command (8.104.0): the development server now supports background execution and explicit shutdown through serve:stop. (docs)
• .env loading support (8.106.0): environment configuration can now be loaded through dotenv, simplifying local variable management. (docs)

Breaking change to keep in mind

• Removal of assets.leading_slash option (8.81.0): this option was removed and may require configuration updates.