Lava, More Powerful in 2.0 Published Jan 15, 2015 Lava is one of Rockʼs most powerful tools. It allows you to customize Rock to your heartʼs content. In McKinley 2.0 we've added even more power to Lava. We’ve also made a few changes. Letʼs take a quick look at whatʼs new. Many of the blocks that use Lava have an Enable Debug setting that allows you to see the merge fields that are available. In 2.0 you'll notice that this feature is much more robust and easier to use. We've invested heavily in this to allow you to create incredible extensions as simply as possible. Getting access to a personʼs address is now possible using the new Address filter. See the Lava guide on itʼs usage. There is a new Default filter that will cut down on the number of if statements you need when checking for empty strings. Now on to what has changed. First, in 1.0 we often used the terms Liquid and Lava interchangeably. Liquid was the industry term for the platform and Lava was Rock’s unique implementation of it. Now that we’ve extended Liquid even further we've decided to drop the term Liquid and only use Lava. To that extent you'll notice that we have renamed all of the Liquid directories to be Lava instead. The way you access attributes has now changed. In the past they were accessed through the dot notation (CurrentPerson.BaptismDate). Now you'll want to access them using the Attribute filter (.) You might be thinking that this seems more complex. Accessing attributes using a filter actually though allows for a great deal more power. Check our new Lava page on Using Attributes for all the details. Similar to the attribute filter you should now access Global Attributes using the notation Spark Development Network. Don't worry, these changes shouldn't break any of our current customizations. With Rock we are working extremely hard not to release breaking changes. That said, change is required over time. Instead we are using the proven practice of deprecation. This means that when we release a new way of doing something we also keep the old way working for an additional version or two to allow you to switch over. This still requires some work on your part, but it doesn't break any of your work. We hope that you enjoy these new features!