Typemill 2.5.0 with Readymades and Embeddings

Version 2.5.0 of Typemill is out with a long list of improvements. Notably, this version introduces predefined setups for themes called Readymades and a new plugin for embeddings. Download the latest version from the Typemill landingpage.

Readymades for Themes

The standard theme of Typemill is very flexible, but it can be quite challenging for new users to configure all the details. With the new Readymades, you can select several predefined settings with a simple click, check the result in the frontend, and adapt the configuration to your needs. You can also store your own Readymades. This way, you can always return to your stored original version or test some layout variants to see which works best.

The standard theme now ships with the following Readymades:

• A dark theme (used for the demo).
• A light theme (used for the demo).
• A theme with a landing page and cyan color code.
• A version with firebrick colors and a list of news on the start page.

Embed Plugin

Have you ever wanted to integrate maps from Google, videos from Vimeo, or songs from soundcloud into your site? With the new embed plugin, you can now easily integrate these media types. Just copy and paste the link to the media from the platform into the shortcode field, and you're done.

The plugin also provides a global solution for privacy: if the privacy option is activated, it will only load media from an external service if the user agrees to it with a button. Since this solution works for all platforms, I will probably drop the default youtube embedings of the visual editor in future to avoid duplicate code.

I will add more embedding options on request, provided the platform supports easy content embedding.

More Features

Among the many other changes in version 2.5.0, the following features are the most notable:

• The plugin ebookproducts is available for Typemill version 2 with a MAKER license. You can create one or many product boxes for ebooks or PDF publications with the plugin. This is probably a niche feature, but I wanted to make it available for those who need it for their publications.
• There is a new role called guest. Guest users have no rights. They can only log in and see the frontend pages for websites that require authentication.
• For the guest user role, there is a new option to log in and authenticate with a simple link. This does not provide any security, but it might be useful if you want to create a "share" link to non-public documentation, similar to a share link for Google Docs. You can use this link in your software, and if you provide a SaaS solution, you can also restrict access based on the referring IP.
• With version 2.5.0, you can also configure the target page after authentication for different user roles.

What is Next?

After some feedback from clients, I decided to prioritize the template plugin for the next release. Content templates are a great addition to the Readymade feature, as they will help users set up new content pages quickly. The translation plugin will also remain a top priority in the coming weeks.

If you have some ideas for plugins, you can vote on several plugin ideas in the GitHub discussions, or you can suggest your own ideas for plugins in the comments. Be aware that all future plugins will be released under a MAKER or BUSINESS license.