Version 2.18 Release Notes - March 17, 2022

Featured Changes

Several enhancements have been made to events in this release, most of which revolve around adding better support for sites that display details for a conference. Detailed below is each enhancement that was made to support this use case.

Note that as with many new features we develop, sites with custom themes or extensive CSS customizations may not be able to use utilize the new features.

Robust Support For Event Speakers

The Event A collection of fields that describe a specific type of content, like a news article, a person, or an event. Site admins can add additional content types by enabling optional modules. WDS can also create custom content types for a site. has always supported specifying basic information about speakers for an event, but for some use cases, more robust display of speaker information is required. This is common for events and speakers related to a conference.

New in this release is an extension to the Events A collection of features or functionality that can be enabled on sites. WDS has made several optional modules available to site administrators to enable on their site. For example, the "News" module enables the News content type and provide a News List Block for displaying news on a page. that adds a dedicated Event Speaker content type.

This content type allows entering much more information for speakers, like a photo, their bio, website, and more. These speakers can then be referenced by one or more events. Speakers have their own detail pages—just like events—and those detail pages will even display a list of past and upcoming events associated with that speaker.

Finally, there's a new Event Speaker List block which can be used for building a directory of all speakers. It's similar to other content list blocks (e.g. News List, People List, Events List, etc) in that you can control what speaker fields to display and filter speakers by specific taxonomy terms.

For now, WDS staff must enable this module on sites. We are piloting it on a few sites before making it generally available.

New Events List Block For Conference Schedules

A new list block called "Events List - Conference" has been added. This block can be used to display a conference schedule. Selected events are grouped by day and tabs are output to browse by those days. Within each tab, the events are listed with their time prominently displayed, making it easy for visitors to quickly see when each event for that day takes place.

This block also has support for displaying event speakers if that module is enabled.

New Fields for Events

There are 4 new fields available for the event content type:

  • Subtitle: Displayed beneath the title on event detail pages and optionally displayed in event list blocks. This field can be useful when you want to include additional information that may not be appropriate to include directly in the title.
  • Virtual Location: A text field (optionally linked) indicating where the event will meet virtually.
  • Registration URL: Provide some other URL that the user can use to register for the event. If provided, will appear on the event detail page as a button with the label "Register".
  • Session Recording: After an event is over, a recording can be provided. This is a reference to a video in your media library, which supports videos hosted in YouTube, Vimeo, or Princeton's Media Central.

New Design for Event Detail Pages

All new sites in the Tiger theme will feature a new event detail page layout. The design updates address content hierarchy feedback, as well as fix some responsive issues for mobile breakpoints specifically. 

Existing sites will not automatically receive the updated styling quite yet. However, site admins can opt-in to the new design by visiting the module settings form for events at Configuration > System > Modules:

Events settings form with the checkbox for controlling the legacy detail page design circled

All Changes

  • #923: Events have several additional fields available along with a new visual design (opt-in for now) for the event detail page. Refer to the featured changes section in the release notes for more details.
  • #1546, #1560: A new optional module, Event Speaker, has been added. This module extends the Events module to add more robust support for adding speakers to events. Refer to the featured changes section in the release notes for more details.
  • #1548: A new block called Events List - Conference has been added for listing events in a different format. This block is intended for conferences, as events are grouped by day and have their times prominently displayed. Refer to the featured changes section in the release notes for more details.
  • #1676: The visual styling for some Webform elements and the font choice for some element labels has been improved.
  • #1677: Fixed an issue where videos embedded inside accordion items were not responsive (they did not adjust their width for smaller screens).
  • #1678: Fixed an issue where images placed within accordion items would overflow out of their container.
  • #1682: Fixed a styling issue that caused the orange detail below center- and right-aligned headings to be displayed incorrectly.
  • #1683: Featured images on Page content items that are set to the "Floated" display option now have a smaller maximum width set. Previously they would display up to 750px wide which was unintentionally too wide.
  • #1685: Fixed a styling issue that was causing taxonomy terms displayed on People detail pages to not output correctly.
  • #1686: Fixed an issue where Feature blocks placed in the larger region of 33/67 or 67/33 layout sections would display incorrectly.
  • #1694: Minor bug fixes for the automated accessibility checker related to external link detection & false positive errors.
  • #1696: Removed the orange detail from Feature block titles if the title is configured to be a link.
  • #1703: Event list blocks using the list style output will no longer leave a large empty gap of space for events that lack an image.
  • #1710: Fixed an issue where the sidebar menu would not disappear on certain smaller screen sizes. The "hamburger" mobile menu is used on these small screen sizes instead.
  • #1726: Fixed an issue with the News Importer (Simple) module where old items that no longer appeared in the source RSS feed would still be displayed in the list block.