WebTech Monthly News – May 2021

June 8, 2021

It's been a busy month in WebTech, starting off with two major site updates: Huxley College of the Environment launched an updated website that is more consistent with the user experience of other sites supported by Western. Academic Technology User Services (ATUS) also went live with their updated website.

Drupal Updates

A core security release from the Drupal project was released. All sites have had the update applied.

New Modules

No new modules were added to the platform in May.

Drupal Theme Updates

Version 3.9.24
  • Some deprecated styles were removed from the theme.
  • Skip link bug was fixed, the link had stopped working properly due to a regression in the code.
Version 3.9.23
  • Lightbox bug fix
  • Taxonomy term style bug fix
Version 3.9.20-3.9.22
  • Org chart fixes
  • View list fix

Users should feel free to review the Ashlar Changelog for current theme updates.

WordPress

New Plugins Activated
  • Accessible Content - checks pages and posts for potential accessibility issues to help ensure your content is accessible.
  • WP SMO - used for optimizing sharing on social networks.
New Plugins Available
  • A-Z Lists - Allows you to insert an A-Z index into a page or post. It’s a quick and easy solution for situations where you need to list a large number of items in a filterable and easily searched A-Z list.
  • Accessible Social Share – An accessible replacement for AddThis Social Share
  • CoBlocks - Adds over twenty blocks to the block editor. The following block types have accessibility barriers, and their use should be avoided:

o Alert

o Collage

o Logos

o Masonry Gallery

o Offset Gallery

o Pricing Tables

o Row

o Shape Divider

o Stacked

o Carousel

  • Comment Moderation E-mail only to Author - Used on group blogs when you want the author to moderate comments on their own posts.
  • Content Update Notification - Helpful for websites where you have multiple people making edits. Sends a notification if an edit is made to a post or page.
  • Cool Timeline - Allows users to display timelines.
  • Disable Comments Completely - Allows the users to disable all comments. Helpful for websites.
  • Divi Accessibility - Improve Divi accessibility in accordance with WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

o A reminder that the Divi theme is not something WebTech provides support for; if you currently leverage Divi elements, please migrate to CoBlocks

  • Duplicate Posts & Pages - A quick way to duplicate or copy a post or page, including the title, contents, tags, and categories so you can re-use an existing post or page easily with minimal effort.
  • Editorial Access Manager - Used on group sites to control who can edit what content.
  • Lightbox for images - Loads the image in a lightbox.
  • Regenerate Thumbnails - Helpful for regenerating images when you change themes and the feature image size is different.

Updates from CampusPress

These updates are to the WordPress hosting environment. Not all changes are available to all users.

  • Advanced Custom Field Pro: updated from version 5.8.12 to 5.9.5
  • Audit Log: added option to change time zone of audit logs (Dashboard > Audit Log > Settings).
  • Div Accessibly: added option to underline all links in Divi under #et-main-area and option to remove the underline from the title and buttons in Divi. · WordPress Core was updated to 5.6.3 to include latest security patches.

Review the CampusPress Changelog for specific details on the plugin updates.