Easy CMS 1.4: background work you can see, and safe on several servers

Easy CMS 1.0 came out on 17 October. Four minor releases followed, all without breaking changes. Here is what they add, and what to do when you upgrade.

Background work runs once (1.3)

Easy CMS does work in the background: scheduled publishing, webhook and email retries, scheduled backups, and the jobs your config or plugins add, such as the shop's payment check. Until 1.3, two servers sharing a database could both pick up the same piece of work. So could the built-in scheduler and a cron in one server. The result was a post published twice, a webhook sent twice, or two backups.

Now every piece of work is claimed in the database before it runs, so it runs once. If a server stops halfway, its work goes back to the queue. Clicking Retry twice on a failed delivery sends it once.

Apps with jobs, shops included, need one migration when they upgrade to 1.3: run easy-cms migrate:create, then easy-cms migrate.

Settings → Jobs (1.4)

A new page shows the background work. It lists every job with its schedule, when it last ran, its result (with the error when it failed) and when it runs next. A second tab shows scheduled publishing that is waiting, running or failed. Run due jobs now runs whatever is due.

The page also says when jobs last ran. If nothing has run them for 10 minutes, it warns you. On serverless hosts this usually means the cron is missing.

Admins can pause a job, for example while a service it calls is down, and resume it later. A paused job shows on the dashboard so it isn't forgotten. Jobs marked adminSchedule: true can be rescheduled from the page.

Jobs at a time of day

A job can now run at a set time in your time zone:

export default defineConfig({
  timeZone: 'Asia/Bangkok',
  jobs: [
    { name: 'sitemap:refresh', at: '02:00', adminSchedule: true, run: refreshSitemap },
  ],
})

If the time is missed, for example during a deploy, the job runs once as soon as jobs run again. timeZone also applies to backups.at.

The admin shows when it is loading (1.2)

The dashboard, lists, forms and settings pages show skeletons in the shape of their content while they load, and a thin bar runs at the top when you change pages. Quick pages show nothing: indicators appear only after 250 ms. They stay still if you turn on reduced motion, and screen readers hear "Loading…" once. The back button on a document returns to its list again, with the same filters and page.

Also

• The shop rechecks payments that are still pending after checkout (1.1), for when the page was closed before the payment came through.

• GraphQL create inputs mark required fields inside groups and rows as required (1.1).

• Dropdowns show the same arrow in every browser (1.3).

Upgrading

Upgrade every package together:

npm install @easy-cms/core@latest easy-cms@latest
npx easy-cms migrate

The Jobs guide has the details, and the changelog lists every release.