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News
"Dottie" Release Notes
Maximum puppy energy meets maximum editor control
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Watch out, world... Here comes Dottie!
The undisputed “Most Exuberant” champ of the dog park, this adorable rescue is navigating her teenage years – constantly alternating between big puppy energy and curious cuddle bug. Her owner, web developer Andrew Aldaya, describes her as having huge feelings for her tiny body.
Just like Dottie at top speed, our latest release came barreling full-throttle onto the Sites Pro scene between November 2025 and January 2026. Now, let’s dig into everything Dottie has brought to your sites!
New & Improved Features
Dottie used her unparalleled energy to generate these helpful new features for your Sites Pro site.
Hiding Unused Content Blocks
Sometimes Dottie likes to hoard her favorite toys for later. Similarly, sometimes you may want to save a perfectly crafted content block for reuse in the future. This is helpful for seasonal content, temporary updates, or testing of alternate layouts.
Editors can now unpublish individual content blocks – including entire 2-column or 3-column rows – without deleting them.
To save a block for later, simply uncheck the corresponding Published checkbox, and Save.
On an edit screen, unpublished blocks are marked with a light pink background and "crossed-out eye" icon.
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Sort Order options for List Pages & List Blocks
Dottie gives you more control over how your content displays in lists – with new sorting options for certain Content Type List Pages and list content blocks.
By user request, you can now choose from preset Sort By and Sort Order criteria for the following content types:
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All editors have the ability to update individual list content blocks, while only Site Admins can change the settings for Content Type List Pages under Structure > Site Information > Customize List Pages (and while you're in there, check out our new nested layout for better usability!).
We are considering expanding this feature to additional content types in the future. Keep an eye on our Microsoft Teams user community to give your feedback!
Date field for Projects
To improve usability and sorting options for Project lists, we've added a new Date field to the Project content type. This field is used exclusively for sorting and does not appear on the front-end site.
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blueSky available in the Footer
A survey of our Teams user group confirmed many of you are promoting the Bluesky social network, so Dottie added it to the footer as an additional social media option.
Site admins can set this up by visiting Structure > Site Information > Footer > Social Media Links.
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Additions to Story content type
Two new arrivals to the Story content type encourage you to explore robust and creative longer-form content in ways that align with your team's workflows:
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- The Alternate Link field connects users directly to story content hosted on another site, while still including the Story item in your site's lists and search results. This allows for better alignment with the News content type, since the two are often used in similar ways.
- You can now use Content Reference blocks to embed specific content items relevant to your story. This is a great way to connect narratives, showcase related work, or guide readers deeper into your content.
Sites Pro system alerts Within your content site
Dottie doesn't always let you know when she's chewing on your favorite book – but, unlike our lovable chaos dog, the Sites Pro team prefers to keep you informed!
In addition to this website and our Teams user group, we now have another way to notify site editors of any system announcements. Our new system notification bar displays you a message directly within your content site – alerting you right where you work!
When the notification bar is active, it will appear in blue at the top of all content sites. It will not be visible to end users on your live sites.
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Small Fixes with Big Impact
A small pup with big impact (sometimes literally, when she's at full speed), Dottie focused her boundless energy on solving problems and polishing the user experience.
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Here are some of the improvements she brought to your sites:
- Improved search accuracy through updates to the Solr search engine.
- Reduced issues with imported content by overhauling how the system handles feeds.
- Added accessibility guardrails to ensure correct heading hierarchy and focus indicators.
- Tidied up the editing interface, including improvements to help text and field labels, as well as removing a redundant Scheduled Content tab from the main Content screen.
- Squashed interesting bugs, like being unable to link the word "document" to an external URL.
- Strengthened the system with Drupal and security updates – plus, laid the groundwork for a major behind-the-scenes infrastructure improvement that you'll hear more about next release!
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Dottie has made herself at home in Sites@Duke Pro — bringing high‑energy improvements, friendly features, and a few surprises... And now she is enjoying a well-earned nap.
As always, our User Guide documentation will be updated shortly. If you have questions or ideas for future releases, we’d love to hear from you through our New Feature Request process.