v0.8.0 – structured product editing, review dates, derived ratings

Product content gets a real editing surface: reviews are a structured list rather than hand-written JSON, and the rating behind them is worked out instead of typed.

Heads up

• Three product fields change type, and EmDash will not alter a field's type in place. On a site that already has products, migrate them from Content Types in the admin:

  • Reviews — delete it, then add it back as a Repeater with sub-fields author (Short Text, required), rating (Number), date (Date & Time) and text (Long Text, required). Put author first: the editor titles each collapsed row from the first text sub-field.
  • Button label — delete it, then add it back as a Select with options Add to basket and Select options, default Add to basket.
  • Rating — delete it. A product's stars are averaged from its reviews now, so nothing needs keeping in step by hand.

  Stored values survived the delete-and-recreate as long as the field slug stayed the same — that is how this release's demo was migrated — but take a backup first.

• Do not migrate with emdash schema remove-field alone. The CLI can delete a field but cannot recreate one carrying a repeater's sub-fields or a select's options, so it will leave you with no way to rebuild them. Applying the new seed only works on a local SQLite site; a deployed site cannot have a seed applied remotely.

• Database migrations run on first start after the EmDash 0.34.0 update.

Added

• Each customer review is described to search engines individually, not just as an average. Results can show a star rating with the number of reviews behind it, which search engines ask for before they will display either.
• Products can carry an availability note. It replaces the generic out-of-stock message when the product is unavailable, so you can say when it is coming back, and sits above the buy button when the product is in stock.
• The content lists in the admin show more at a glance — pages carry their layout, and products their price, SKU and stock state.

Fixed

• The two out-of-stock demo products now show a price. Both were seeded without one, so their pages had no price at all and search engines were told nothing about what they cost.

Changed

• Product reviews are edited as a proper list, with a row per review carrying its own author, rating, date and body, and rows that can be dragged into a new order.
• A product's star rating is worked out from its reviews instead of being typed in separately. The two could drift apart, and adding a review in the new editor would have done exactly that. Every product shows the rating it showed before.
• Customer reviews carry a real date. They all read "7th June" before, with no year, so search engines got no review date at all.
• The product button label is chosen from a list rather than typed, so a typo cannot put wording on a product that appears nowhere else. Its default now applies to new products, which it never did.
• Every product has its own SKU. Six had none and three shared placeholders, which search engines read as one product listed several times.
• Portfolio project dates are real dates, picked from a calendar instead of typed as free text. They read the same on the site as before, but the admin can sort and filter projects by them.
• Category, tag, project-type and project-tag archives ask search engines to index the posts they list rather than the list itself, so thin copies stop competing with the real pages.
• EmDash 0.33.0 to 0.34.0.

Documentation

• The README explains how to keep uploaded images visible to search engines. EmDash's stock robots.txt blocks the path its media proxy serves uploads from, so link previews are hidden from crawlers until you replace that file.

Full changelog: v0.7.0...v0.8.0