Upgrading to v8

If you are migrating from WordPress to Altis, check out the migrating guide here first.

To upgrade to Altis v8, edit your composer.json and change the version constraint for altis/altis and any local environment modules to ^8.0.0.

In addition you will need to change the config.platform.php property to 7.4.13 (if present).

{
	"require": {
		"altis/altis": "^8.0.0"
	},
	"require-dev": {
		"altis/local-chassis": "^8.0.0",
		"altis/local-server": "^8.0.0"
	},
	"config": {
		"platform": {
			"php": "7.4.13"
		}
	}
}

Once you have made these changes run composer update.

To make upgrades simpler Altis v8 introduces a new CLI command to carry out common migration and maintenance tasks whenever you upgrade. Run the following command after the update (including on local environments):

# For cloud environments
wp altis migrate

# For local server
composer server cli -- altis migrate

# For local chassis
composer chassis exec -- wp altis migrate

Breaking Changes

WP SEO replaced by Yoast SEO

Our internal, native fork of WP SEO along with SEO tools like meta-tags and XML sitemaps have been replaced by Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO is the most widely used and best in class SEO solution for WordPress, and is now a tech partner of Altis. Projects that are using Yoast SEO Premium can continue to use the Premium version without any changes.

For projects that were using the legacy SEO settings for custom title tags and meta descriptions a data migration script has been added as part of the new wp altis migrate WP-CLI command.

If you had any custom sitemaps built on top of the WordPress core site maps these will need to be re-enabled or converted to use the Yoast SEO sitemaps API.

Post Cloner replaced by Yoast Duplicate Posts

The existing Post Cloner feature has been removed in favor of Yoast Duplicate Posts. In addition to replicating the functionality of Post Cloner, Duplicate Posts also adds the ability to create amendments to a post or page without affecting the published content.

If you had code integrating with the legacy post cloner feature through any action or filter hooks you will need to update it. Check out the Clone & Amend documentation to see what's changed.

Headline Features

Global Content Repository and Global Media Library

Altis includes a Global Content Repository framework. This is a site on the network that can be used to distribute content elsewhere via the REST API or directly to other sites on the network. The Global Content Repository framework powers the new Global Media Library. When the Global Media Library component is enabled in your Altis config, it enables any site on the network to access a common library of images without needing to re-upload anything. Whenever an image from the Global Media Library is used in a post, all the links point back to the original URL in the Global Repository, while allowing the local site's metadata (captions, alt text, etc) to be changed and stored locally.

You can read more in the documentation about the Global Content Repository, Global Media Library and the Asset Manager Framework that makes this feature possible.

Additionally the Asset Manager Framework makes it possible to build integrations with any Digital Asset Manager (DAM) out there, meaning editors could easily search and pull images from multiple sources through the same interface.

Yoast SEO

As noted in the breaking changes section above the existing SEO features have been collectively replaced with the free version of Yoast SEO. This brings huge improvements to Altis' SEO functionality including search engine result previews, dynamic SEO scores and content analysis, duplicate content warnings, cornerstone content, vastly improved schema.org JSON+LD output and much much more.

You can check out the full feature set of Yoast SEO here.

Clone & Amend

Although post cloning is not a new feature Altis v8 brings the much sought after ability to make changes to published content without those changes going live straight away. This allows editorial teams to work confidently on content updates and get approval before publishing. Amendments to posts or pages can also be scheduled to go live at a future date.

This feature is enabled for all public post types by default, check out the Clone & Amend documentation to learn about the configuration options and integration hooks.

Other Features and APIs

Altis Migrate CLI command

To simplify some of the common upgrade and migration commands that typically need to be run on sites, as well as to provide an easy way to migrate legacy data to new formats, Altis now includes the wp altis migrate command. One of the tasks this command does is to set up the Global Content Repository site. The command can be hooked into by any custom code as well if you wish to extend it.

Local Avatars

This is enabled by default and built on 10up's Simple Local Avatars plugin and provides an alternative to using Gravatar as the only option for user profile avatars. If no avatar is uploaded, a Gravatar is used, but it provides the option for using an uploaded image. As a bonus, it integrates natively with the Global Content Repository and Global Media Library -- so if your profile photo only existed in the Global Media Library, you can still use it as your avatar! As usual, this feature is configurable in the Altis config. You can read the local avatars documentation here.

Documentation

We've added three new guides to the Altis documentation: