Version 2.36 Release Notes - February 2024

Important Note

Please note that if WDS has customized your site (e.g. custom content types, theme, or other functionality), the improvements and fixes listed below may not be applicable.

Release Schedule

  • Most Faculty, Lab, Researcher sites: Wednesday, February 14, 3:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m.
  • Most Department, Program, and Center sites: Thursday, February 15, 3:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m.
  • Alternate day (if there's a need to reschedule): Friday, February 16, 3:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m.

Release Highlights

New "Announcements" Feed

To aid in communicating with site editors and admins, Web Development Services can now publish announcements that are viewable directly within each Site Builder website. Announcements can be viewed by clicking the "Announcements" item in the admin toolbar:

Admin toolbar highlighting the new "Announcements" item

For now, WDS plans to use this feature to broadcast information about platform maintenance (in addition to the existing email blasts) and upcoming training classes.

Homepage Deletion Protection

The page that is set as the front page (homepage) can no longer be deleted or unpublished. In the past, users would sometimes perform either of these actions unintentionally, not realizing the page was set to the homepage. This would result in visitors seeing a Not Found or Access Denied page when visiting a website until the action could be reversed.

As a reminder, Site Admins can specify which Page to set as the front page (homepage) via the Basic Site Settings form.

All Changes

Content List Blocks & Content Slider

  • #545: Content list blocks (e.g. News List, People List, etc) that are configured to output tagged taxonomy terms (e.g. News Category, Person Category, etc.) for each A individual item of content. For example, a page, a news article, and an event are all content items, which correspond to the Page, News, and Event content types, respectively. can now be configured to also output the A term is an individual item that belongs to some taxonomy vocabulary, typically used for categorizing content. For example, a vocabulary "Colors" may have terms in it "Red", "Green", "Blue". label before the list of terms.
  • #2735: Fixed an issue with the Content Slider Block that would sometimes result in newly added news, posts, pages, or events from appearing in the slider until a whole-site cache clear was performed. New content should now appear within 1 minute.

Events

  • #2486: Featured Images that are set to “float” on event detail pages will no longer float to the right if there is no event description.
  • #2733: On-campus events imported from My PrincetonU (Campus Groups) will no longer include Princeton’s address in the location field. Addresses will still be included for off-campus events (if provided).

Google Analytics

  • #2479: Updated the Site Builder Google Analytics documentation to include instructions on how to track document download clicks.
  • #2676: Google Analytics tracking cookies have been updated so that the cookie domain is set to the site’s full domain name instead of the “higher level” domain. For example, previously the tracking cookie for sitebuilder.princeton.edu was set to *.princeton.edu (meaning it would also be sent to all other subdomains of princeton.edu), but it is now set to sitebuilder.princeton.edu (meaning it will only be sent when visiting that site). This change should not have any long term impact on tracking, unless there are sites that track “user journeys” from one site to another. If you think that affects you, please open a support ticket with WDS.

Media

  • #2712: The max file size for Private Images (available only to sites using the Access Control module) has been set to 10 MB. The max file size for Audio files has been set to 20 MB. Previously, both limits were set to 128 MB, but this higher limit was not intentional. These file size limits are in place primarily to ensure reasonable use of available file system storage.

Menu

  • #2715: Fixed an issue where the mobile menu was limited to 3 levels deep on sites that use the mega menu. Now all levels are available to navigate. Previously, it was not possible for mobile visitors to navigate beyond the 3rd level of links in the menu.

Misc

  • #69: Content authors, content editors, and site admins can now view announcements from Web Development Services from the admin toolbar. Click the “Announcements” button to view a list of recent announcements. When a new announcement is available, an indicator will be displayed in the toolbar.
  • #1967: The “Help” button in the admin toolbar has been renamed to “Site Builder Help” and the icon has changed from a “V2” to a question mark. Additionally, the page that is displayed when a site is in maintenance mode has been updated to include a link to the Site Builder documentation website.
  • #2588: A site’s homepage can no longer be deleted or unpublished. Users would sometimes do this accidentally without realizing what happened. Additionally, when editing the homepage using the “Edit” tab, a warning message is displayed reminding users that they are editing the homepage.
  • #2633: Updated how the “discourage search engine indexing” feature is implemented to use a “noindex” HTML metatag instead of a robots.txt disallow rule. Both Google and Bing recommend using the metatag to prevent indexing. Note that this feature is not respected by all search engine crawlers.
  • #2694: Fixed a caching issue where newly created pages might sometimes display a 404 for anonymous visitors, if a someone visited the path of the new page recently.
  • #2705: Authenticated user sessions will now be ended after 12 hours of inactivity. In effect, this will typically mean that content authors, content managers, and site admins users will typically need to re-authenticate via CAS at least once per day.
  • #2729: Renamed the primary admin account from “Site Factory admin” to “admin”. Note that this account is not used by any individual, but exists on all sites and is sometimes assigned as the owner of content that is created by automated processes (e.g. feed importers).

News

  • #2687: News List Blocks and Posts List Blocks will now separate multiple authors with a comma (or semicolon, if any of the author names already contain a comma). Additionally, multiple authors on news and post detail pages have reduced empty space around them if they do not have pictures.
  • #2699: Fixed an issue where news RSS feeds would produce an error if a news article used a private image for its featured image.

News Importer & Events Importer

  • #2718: Content that’s imported from automatic feed importers (e.g. the News Importer or Event Importer) is now set to have the “admin” user as its owner instead of “Anonymous”. Additionally, revisions will always be created for any changes the importer makes to existing content and the revision author will be “admin”.
    • Important Note: Previously imported feed items will be "refreshed" from the source feed (if they still exist in the feed). Overrides made to this content will be lost (e.g., you changed the title or body of an imported news article). You can restore your edits by reverting to the previous revision of the affected content, but WDS does not recommend a continuing to override imported fields. There's always a risk it will be lost when upstream changes to the feed are made.

People

  • #2696: Fixed an issue where certain office hour ranges could not be entered on the Person edit form and would display the error message “Closing hours are earlier than Opening hours”.

Publications

  • #2440: Improved performance of pages that use the Publications List Block with exposed filters for Author and/or Keywords.

Webform

  • #2706: It’s now possible to configure a Webform to act as a signup form for a Mail Chimp newsletter. Contact WDS to have this feature enabled.
  • #2731: Fixed a color contrast issue with info, warning, and error dialogs displayed when configuring Webform elements.