"Stormy" Release Notes

Our aptly-named Stormy release was deployed to Sites@Duke Pro during the week of October 3, 2022 – just after Tropical Storm Ian swept through campus. Stormy’s namesake, the cat of Sites Pro service owner Ryn Nasser, personally signed off on the update with a flick of her tail and an authoritative meow.

Stormy focuses on improving user experience through accessibility, quality assurance (QA), system infrastructure, and usability enhancements – as well as small feature additions requested by our users.

Integrations

The Sites Pro base build offers integrations with a number of enterprise systems and third-party services. In response to feature requests from our users, Stormy adds the ability for site editors to embed content from the following services:

• Panopto – Duke’s enterprise platform for recording and sharing video
• Microsoft Bookings – a scheduling tool available as part of Office 365
• IM Leagues – a league registration platform

These embeds can be added to Pages and Stories using an iFrame content block.

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system infrastructure

Stormy includes a number of "under the hood" code and infrastructure enhancements to improve system performance, reliability, scalability, and stability. These updates:

• Bring underlying Sites Pro technology up to the latest versions (e.g., moving from PHP7 to PHP8).
• Provide a more seamless editing experience for our users by improving the integration between the back-end Drupal database, Preview pane, and front-end website.
• Make it easier for our team to update and maintain the Sites Pro service moving forward.

other notable stormy updates

1. Minor tweaks to the Resource content type in response to QA and user feedback
2. Accessibility enhancements – such as adding underlines to links with header styles (see example image below) and improving help text to guide content editors toward making more accessible choices
3. Removing the "BIO" subheading from Profile pages
4. QA fixes submitted by users 

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Training documentation will be available on userguide.sitespro.duke.edu shortly. If you have a question about a specific update, please contact us!

Also, you can submit new feature ideas for consideration through our New Feature Request process.