StackBlitz August 2022 Update

It’s a beautiful month in the neighborhood: we’ve released two features for educators and content creators (Collections and Social Previews), over 14,000 people registered for ViteConf and we’ve announced the all-star speaker list! Grab your free ticket if you haven’t yet!

Today we are bringing you:

• StackBlitz in the wild: news from our community
• DX & Compatibility improvements: the change log
• Quick bites for the road

I hope you’ll have a wonderful month!

StackBlitz in the wild

• “Animations are hard”, says Theo and then presents a two-liner solution to elegant animations - definitely a great hack to bookmark!
• Did you know that StackBlitz can run PHP? See the example shared by Nat Moore who built the PHP integration to Astro.
• Speaking of Astro, you most probably seen the outpouring of love towards their 1.0 release on Twitter. If you’d like to learn what Astro is, what it does, and why the recent release is SO COOL, check this episode of Learn with Jason featuring Fred K. Schott, the creator of Astro.
• Have you heard of Initab? It’s a new tab extension that replaces Chrome’s new tab page with a dashboard of useful tools to make your job as a programmer easier. And their ‘playground’ feature uses StackBlitz! Really cool 🤩
• This Firebase post on ViteConf is jolly and made our day.

DX & compatibility improvements

As we’re working on new tools, we are finishing the month with a whole plethora of improvements:

• WebContainers project configuration:
  • Fixed export for angular project without index.html in src directory.
  • Added framework detection for WebContainers-powered projects! Now you can see different icons in the list of projects on the new projects you create and those you update.
  • Restored the ability to edit a project’s title, description and URL on small devices (smartphones and tablets).
  • Updated the editor to TypeScript 4.7.4. version.
• Collections:
  • Added a possibility to open projects within Collections with cmd+click/ ctrl+click / mouse-wheel+click.
  • Added a view count on Collection card, on dashboard, and Collection page.
  • Moved the Collection edit page to a modal.
• Bug fixes and improvements:
  • Fixed social previews for /fork links.
  • StackBlitz V1 (EngineBlock) correctly reports issues in running the Angular compiler, caused by an incorrect Typescript version.
  • Fix StackBlitz V1 (EngineBlock) dependency resolution to allow for a package to reference itself. Also addressed the case where a sub-package is self-referenced through the bare package import.
  • Fixed modals display when side drawer is opened in the editor.
  • Added an error in the GitHub repo connection dialog on creating a repo with a name that’s already taken.
  • Made the “sign in to save your changes” warnings in the editor less distracting, and made them take up less space.
  • Added an opt-in list for the unpkg entry point of packages as opposed to the current opt-out list.
  • Fixed the realm-web dependency entry point bug.
  • Fixed issue where images don’t get corrupted when forking a GitHub imported project.
  • Fixed an issue where downloading a zip of a project broke the downloaded images.
• Docs:
  • Added a small version of our badge (call-to-action button).
  • Added a page about defining NPM dependencies with SDK.

Quick bites for the road

• Did you know that we have released two awesome features this month: social previews and collections? Yes, that’s right! You can now group your StackBlitz projects and share with your friends, fans, and strangers on the web!
• If you’d like to hear Tomek Sułkowski, our Developer Advocate, talk WebContainers, in-browser Node, and all things StackBlitz, here’s a PodRocket episode for you.
• Eric Simons, our CEO, also talked about StackBlitz and the future of web - listen to his vision on Angular Plus Show.
• Do you already have a ticket for ViteConf? Just in case, it’s an online and free conference with an all-star speaker list celebrating the web ecosystem at large. Excited? See you on 10-11 October 2022!

What’s next?

We are so excited for what the nearest future will bring — we are cooking something really special for you! In the meantime, stay tuned on Twitter or join our Discord community.