December 2025: The 'oops, missed a bit' release

I missed doing a dev release last month because I kept thinking I'd nearly got the ShinyShop branch ready for another merge and release, and it kept being 'nearly but not quite ready' for the whole month - and it's still not ready now. So let that be a lesson to you (okay, to me) - "release early, release often" means what it says!

I am hoping to get another release out at the start of January 2026 with the tranche of the Shop stuff in it, but either way I hope to have learned my lesson here, and not to miss doing my monthly dev releases in future.

This month does include updates both minor and major to rack, view_component, stripe, sidekiq, glob, mjml, brakeman, sentry-ruby and sentry-rails, aws-sdk-s3, acts-as-as-taggable-on, core-js, coverband, i18n-tasks, bundler-audit, and rails-pg-extras (none of which required significant code changes) and many various rubocop-* plugins (some of which did, albeit generally for no particularly useful reason that I could tell).

October 2025: The 'Também disponível em português' release

As alluded to in the release name, this month I started merging Manuel's contributions to translate the ShinyCMS admin features into Portuguese. Obrigado Manuel! So far he's done all of the main admin area, as well as the ShinyAccess, ShinyBlog, and ShinyForms plugins. Hopefully there will be more Portuguese plugin translations to come over the next few months, to cover the rest of the CMS features.

If anybody would like to contribute some Spanish translations, that would save me having to embarrass myself by discovering how much español I've forgotten in the last 10 years 😃 And between those three languages I think that will cover quite a lot of people - English speakers constitute over 18% of the global population, Spanish speakers more than 7%, and Portuguese speakers more than 3%. I'm guessing it might be a bit trickier to find somebody who can do Mandarin (14%), but I'd be delighted to be proved wrong! If you're interested in contributing any of those translations, feel free to get in touch for more details of how the translation layer works - you don't need to understand any code to help with translation work, it's all in plain text files, although obviously it will be easier if you know how to run a Rails app locally for testing.

Gems updated this month: puma, pundit, sidekiq, mjml, rexml, recaptcha, sentry, mutant-rspec, and rubocop-rails

And there was a new minor Rails version released, 8.0.4 - but it broke all the Rich Text editors (CKEditor, ActionText, etc), so I rejected the PR. Hopefully they'll release a healthier one soon.

Full Changelog: v25.09...v25.10

September 2025: The 'Still Working On The Shop Branch' release

Another quiet month for the main branch, with most of my work going into the shop-product-descriptions branch and some other odds and ends.

Notable updates this month include puma (from 6.6.1 to 7.0.0), as well as more minor updates to rack, pg, view_component, pagy, and various rubocop gems.

There were a couple of attempts at making reloads work better in the dev server (the way I pull in the plugins seems to upset it currently), but they caused severe oddness with the test coverage for some reason, so they had to be backed out for now.

Full Changelog: v25.08...v25.09

August 2025: The 'Component With An Updated View' release

Major upgrade for ViewComponent this month, now at 4.0.0 - which required a bit of fiddling around to keep Blazer working, as one of its secondary dependencies broke during the update.

Fixed the usage of SoftDelete so that it doesn't get stroppy about saving updates to user capabilities.

Removed config for CodeClimate, which has sadly shut down. Shame, I really liked that service.

Also updated: pg, rack, puma, stripe (from 10.x to 15.x), pagy, mjml-rails, bugsnag, brakeman, and as ever, nokogiri and rubocop. And many more - see the release notes for the full list.

In the background, work continues on adding functionality to flesh out the new ShinyShop engine. This month it gained a stack of Elements, Sections, Templates, and TemplateElements, similar to that found in the ShinyPages engine. I'm hoping to release another tranche of that work next month.

Full Changelog: v25.07...v25.08

July 2025: The 'I shop, therefore I am' release

The big news this month is the first merge of the ShinyShop plugin into the main branch!

Still a lot of work to do here, but 'release early, release often' as the famous saying goes 🙂

Shop aside, there were quite a lot of dependabot PRs this month, which have all gone in, mostly without a fight. There some minor squabbles around some rubocop changes, as is starting to feel standard. There was also a minor/patch upgrade for Ruby itself.

I changed buttons to links in a few places to make them less JavaScript-dependent, but eventually added rails-ujs back in explicitly to handle the others.

There was a major update to rails-pg-extras which got yanked shortly after release, but not shortly enough for me to avoid installing it, so that caused some excitement. I got it downgraded to the latest minor version before the mess, once I figured out what was going on.

There were also updates to rack, packwerk, pundit, view_component, and a load of monitoring gems and rubocop plugins (meaning all the rubocop-* gems I use are now the newer plugin style) as well as rubocop itself. I also added explicit config for bugsnag so that I could ignore some noisy 404s from spammy PHP exploit bots that were filling up my logs.

Full Changelog: v25.06...v25.07

June 2025: The 'Make Rubocop Happier' release

Most of my time this month has gone into the Shop feature branch, which is getting close to an initial merge/release, hopefully in July/August.

In the main branch this month I have:

• Bumped Ruby from 3.4.2 to 3.4.3
• Changed the logout link to a logout button to get that working again (not sure exactly when it stopped working, but I assume it was at some point during the last few months of back-to-back Rails upgrades)
• Merged some contributions from @MrBowmanXD, which fixed some long-standing Rubocop warnings
• Merged a couple of gem updates from @dependabot, including one to mitigate a possible Rack DDoS flaw
• Added some documentation about the use of Rack::Attack

May 2025: The 'Shiny and New!' release

Headline news is of course the last step (for now!) in the recent series of sequential Rails upgrades - we're now on the latest current release, Rails 8.0, having started at 6.1 in January this year and worked our way through 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 in the last few months.

Also featured this month:

• Upgraded pagy to current (9.x) series (in #1957)
• Added and expanded Rack::Attack filtering to save error logs filling up with botspam from hacked WordPress sites (in #1960, #1961, #1963, and #1964)
• Plus various gem updates, whenever dependabot offered them

Full Changelog: v25.04...v25.05

April 2025: The "April's Cool" release

Once again, this month's main highlight is a Rails upgrade, from 7.1 to Rails 7.2

This was actually a much smaller change than the last two releases. I think there were more changes for Rubocop this month than there were for Rails.

Also prism replaced parser, nokogiri got at least two security fixes this month, I replaced my .ruby-version hack with the new official built-in version of the same thing, and cloudflare-rails is finally completely up to date.

March 2025: Another month, another bump

This month's release takes us from Rails 7.0 to Rails 7.1

It also takes us from Ruby 3.2 to Ruby 3.4

And that's about it for this month's news 🙂

February 2025: UPDATE ALL THE (most important) THINGS!!!

MAJOR updates!

BREAKING changes!!

Ruby 3.2
Rails 7.0
... and some other stuff 😁