Changes

This document highlights the most important fixes, improvements, and features, that were introduced in Webiny 5.17.0.

New Security Layer

For the past several months, we’ve been collecting feedback and requirements from community, partners, and clients, related to the inner (and outer) workings of our security layer. In this release, we’re happy to present you with the new security layer, which is a lot more flexible, and can cater for a wide variety of authentication and authorization scenarios.

It can be connected to any IdP with ease, as it now revolves entirely around identities, and not users. User profiles are entirely optional, and Webiny can function without any user-related information, as long as you can verify an identity.

Cognito Admin Users

Admin users logic is now separated from the security layer logic, and has a dedicated npm package, that handles admin user profiles, specifically for Cognito IdP.

On top of that, we’ve migrated user profiles to use IdP sub (a real ID) instead of using an email address as a unique identifier. This means that in new projects, created from Webiny v5.17.0, you will be able to change user emails, because they are no longer used as an ID in the database, and Cognito User Pool configuration was changed to allow this behavior, using the preferred_username attribute. To learn more about Cognito User Pool attributes, visit the official AWS documentation .

In the Admin Area project application, we’ve slightly rearranged menu items to reflect these changes in security and user profiles. We now have an Access Management section, which contains API Keys and Groups (which are IdP agnostic), and then there’s a dedicated Admin Users section, which is dedicated to the Cognito Admin Users implemention:

Access Management and Admin Users now have separate sections in the main navigation.

(click to enlarge)

Keep in mind that Access Management will always be there, no matter what IdP you use. But Admin Users you see here is our default implementation of users using the Cognito IdP. If you use Okta, or any other IdP, there may be an entirely different implementation of user management, which you can implement yourself.

New System of Events

We’ve developed a new mechanism of publishing and subscribing to events, to prevent explosion of plugins in the GraphQL API. Our new applications, like tenancy, security, and several others, now use this new system of events to make it easier to discover and extend functionality of Webiny.

Instead of creating a new plugin type for every entity or event, events are defined on the application level (in the context object) and are easily discoverable in any IDE:

Discover application events by typing on to filter out event topics.

(click to enlarge)

This greatly simplifies the process of subscribing to multiple events across the system, using a simple ContextPlugin plugin:

new ContextPlugin(context => {
  context.security.onLogin.subscribe(({ identity }) => {
    // At this point, you have a valid identity object.
  });

  context.adminUsers.onUserBeforeCreate.subscribe(({ inputData }) => {
    // Validate new user input.
  });

  context.tenancy.onTenantAfterCreate.subscribe(({ tenant }) => {
    // Call external services to notify about a new tenant.
  });
});

The new system of events is not yet propagated through all the Webiny applications, but this is how all new applications expose their events. In the near future we’ll migrate all the apps to follow this system of events.

Enterprise Features

NOTE: the following features are only available to Enterprise License users. If interested, book a call to find out more.

Multi-Tenancy

Our GraphQL API and Admin Area application now officially support multi-tenancy, with a new Tenant Manager module. This allows you to build SaaS-like applications, where tenants have their data completely isolated from each other, using one deployment of Webiny.

Tenant Manager module allows you to create new tenants and switch between them.

(click to enlarge)

Okta Integration

Webiny can now be integrated with Okta IdP for both the GraphQL API and Admin Area app. You have full control over your Okta configuration and how you perform authentication and authorization. With extensive set of events in our new security layer, you can configure any authentication/authorization flow imaginable.

Okta login using Okta's React SDK.

(click to enlarge)

Other

Sort Settings for Pages List Element (#1997 )

In one of the recent releases, we did some updates to the Page Builder GraphQL schema, to use the same naming convention and parameter types across similar queries within Webiny. With that, we’ve broken the Pages List element within our Page Builder. 😢

Big shout out to @dibenso who discovered and fixed this bug 🙌 🧡

Menu Component Positioning (#2006 )

Menu component now positions correctly when rendered at the bottom of the view, and is not being cut off by overflow: hidden parent element.

Menu now changes direction depending on its location in the view.

(click to enlarge)

Shout out to @econtentmaps for reporting this one 🍻

Grid/Cell Element Width in the PB Editor (#1412 )

In the Page Builder Editor, setting the width of a grid to 50% would make the width of a child cell also be 50% (which is relative to the parent grid, resulting in a wrong final size). This is now fixed, and grid cells are no longer affected by changes of width on the parent grid element.

gridWidth

(click to enlarge)

This one was also reported by @econtentmaps 🙌 🚀

React Form Component

Form component has undergone some refactoring, and was migrated from a class component to a functional component. With this, each <Form> is now effectively a React Context provider, and you can bind to a form using the useBind() hook. More on this coming in the docs in the near future.