Upcoming Release: Sunny

We’re excited to introduce our next Sites@Duke Pro release, Sunny – named in honor of our Drupal and DevOps magician David “Lewis” Morrison and his goldendoodle sidekick, who knows exactly how to brighten a room.

Image

Sunny is a delightful pup with a talent for lifting spirits. She’s a tug‑of‑war champion, a firm believer in daily snuggles, and absolutely not a morning dog. A true Libra, she is both charming and loyal.

Like Sunny the dog, we think you'll be happy to see Sunny the release! This one will be a bit different than the others. Along with the usual Drupal updates, security patches, and bug squashing, we're working on a major behind-the-scenes upgrade that will bring big benefits to our users. Non-mission-critical feature updates and fixes may be held until a future release, as we concentrate our efforts on this big structural change.

Goodbye, Gatsby! Hello, Next.js!

Currently, Sites Pro uses the Gatsby framework as our middleware – the technology that packages up your Drupal content and delivers it to the front-end as a beautifully designed site. However, we've had our issues with Gatsby over the years, and now support for Gatsby from the development community has dwindled.

Thus, Sunny will mark our migration from Gatsby to Next.js, another open-source middleware framework. Next.js has much better community support, puts less strain on our system, and gives us more options for better performance. This significant shift has been months in the making and positions us for better reliability, flexibility, and long‑term maintenance.

Image

A Smoother Preview Experience

We understand the current Preview pane experience has been increasingly glitchy for some users, and this stems from limitations of our existing middleware setup. Transitioning to Next.js will put less load on our system and provide a more reliable Preview window for editors. We know this will be a welcome upgrade and can't wait to share it with you!

This infrastructure change also lays a strong foundation for future under-the-hood updates – part of our continuous improvement plan to optimize the system and give users the best experience possible.

Our team is excited for this major architectural upgrade, and we hope you are, too! Sunny is surely wagging her tail in agreement, as well. Stay tuned to this website and our Teams User Group for details on release timing and anything you'll need to know before Sunny rolls out. We’re looking forward to bringing this brighter, faster future to Sites@Duke Pro!