TinaCMS October 2026 so far: colour, references and upgrades
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If you're planning a TinaCMS upgrade, October's changes give you a few things to check before handing the editor back to your team: custom rich-text toolbars, existing reference indexes and self-hosted sign-in.
This month-to-date roundup covers 1 to 22 October 2026, Australia/Brisbane, using public evidence available when researched on 22 October. It highlights published TinaCMS package releases, rather than a full-month release total or a claim that every deployment has upgraded.
Text colour arrives in TinaCMS 3.15.0
TinaCMS 3.15.0, released on 19 October, adds a Text Color dropdown beside Highlight in the default rich-text toolbar. You can set a palette for each field with overrides.textColors. If you've defined a custom overrides.toolbar, add textColor to that list to show the button.
The rich-text documentation explains the configuration and saved markup. Colour is stored in a span inside surrounding formatting such as bold or italic. The release also fixes a case where adjacent text picked up a neighbour's formatting when saved.
There are limits to check before enabling it. The merged implementation records a remaining problem with bold, italic or strikethrough that begins or ends mid-word next to coloured text. That combination can reload with literal formatting characters.
For TinaCloud projects, the release discussion also identifies a required update to TinaCloud's pinned GraphQL package. The package release alone does not confirm that deployment. Confirm the cloud update before relying on text colour surviving a save.
Reference indexing reaches inside blocks and rich text
A reference can sit inside a templated list item or an MDX component in rich text. The previous index could miss those references, so a rename or delete could leave them pointing at an old path.
Released on 19 October, @tinacms/graphql 4.0.1 changes reference discovery to walk a document against its schema. The implementation also removes the default 50-result limit from the reference lookup used for rename and delete updates.
Existing indexes need a reindex to pick up previously missed references and clear stale entries. Upgrading the package or writing one document does not replace all the old entries. Plan that step alongside the upgrade, then check references in your own content.
Self-hosted sites need a regenerated database client
The 12 October releases of @tinacms/graphql 4.0.0 and @tinacms/datalayer 3.0.0 carry an upgrade requirement: sign-in needs a database client generated by the matching CLI.
Update @tinacms/cli with those packages, then run tinacms build or tinacms dev to regenerate tina/__generated__/databaseClient before deployment. An older generated client cannot sign in with the new authentication handler.
On self-hosted sites with an auth collection, list the users who need to add, edit or remove users from the admin in authCollection.admins. Other users can still change their own passwords. This is the self-hosted upgrade described in the release changeset, separate from the TinaCloud authentication migration covered in September.
For self-hosted Next.js App Router projects, @tinacms/cli 4.0.3, released on 19 October, also normalises generated database-client results into plain objects before returning them. That addresses the null-prototype result objects rejected at the Server Component to Client Component boundary (#7741).
Smaller fixes editors will notice
TinaCMS 3.15.0 also makes the date picker follow timeFormat: a format such as HH:mm opens a 24-hour picker without an AM/PM selector. Twelve-hour formats and timeFormat: true retain the 12-hour picker (#7798). List-field descriptions wrap instead of being cut off with an ellipsis (#7734).
In TinaCMS 3.14.4, released on 12 October, the saved/unsaved indicator gains an accessible name, so its state is no longer communicated by colour alone (#7791).
Before upgrading to 3.15.0, check your React version too. The release moves React Router to version 7, which requires React 18 or later. Read the release notes alongside your project's package versions, and test the editor, sign-in and content saves in your own environment before deployment.