Core CMS v0.6.8: Native Drag-and-Drop Navigation & Rich Search Results

We are thrilled to announce the release of Core CMS v0.6.8! This update takes the user experience and developer extensibility of Core CMS to a whole new level. We've introduced a premium, visual drag-and-drop menu reordering interface, unlocked complete design freedom for custom menus with raw HTML and SVG icon support, and added rich featured image thumbnails to frontend search results. Let's dive into the details!

Major Highlights / Updates

In this release, we've focused heavily on improving control and aesthetic customization in the admin panel and public storefront alike. Here are the major highlights:

• Native Drag-and-Drop Navigation: Reordering menu items in the admin panel is now completely visual. Click and drag rows to rearrange links in real-time, and watch numerical inputs sync instantly.
• Raw SVG & HTML Menu Labels: Emojis, vector icons, and raw HTML are now natively supported in menu labels, giving you full design freedom. No more plain text limits!
• Seeded Plugin Menu Items: The Search, Commerce Shop, and Event Planner plugins now seed their frontend navigation items (e.g. #search, /shop, /cart, /events) directly into the database on activation, ensuring they can be reordered like any other link and deep-cleaned on uninstall (Zero Residue).
• Rich Search Result Thumbnails: Search results now pull and render post featured image thumbnails dynamically, styled with modern flexbox layouts and sleek hover scaling animations.
• Ecosystem-Wide Theme Compatibility: Checked and aligned alignments across all core themes (Glassmorphism, Technomancer, UV Neon Synthwave, and Sylvan River) for a seamless layout experience.

Technical Deep Dive

Behind the scenes, we've refactored core functions and database schemas to enforce our "Lightweight Core" and "Skeleton-Skin" architecture:

• TEXT Database Columns: Migrated the menu_items.label column to a TEXT type to prevent database truncation of custom SVG markup, which often exceeds standard VARCHAR(255) limits.
• Core Seeding API: Introduced seed_menu_item() and remove_menu_item() helper functions in the core functions file for safe, non-destructive plugin activation setups.
• Target CSS Selectors: Enqueued the .nav-menu class alongside .site-menu inside search.css to allow vertical alignment parity for themes using custom list classes.
• Safe HTML Option Rendering: Leveraged strip_tags() inside select dropdown fields so that raw SVG markup doesn't break input option lists.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, we will continue expanding our modular plugin systems (like F&B table layouts and boutique checkouts) and deepening core AI integrations.

Try it out at core-cms.brainav.ca.

Until next time!

— Jason Brain