Upcoming Releases: Patch & Piper

Here come Piper (left) and Patch (right)!

These two beagle siblings are the inspiration behind the next two Sites@Duke Pro releases. Playful Piper and her older sister Patch live with Duke Web Services development lead David White.

Patch

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This is a Quality Assurance (QA) release, including small technical and performance fixes, as well as enhancements to improve accessibility, usability, and user experience. The goal is to keep the system running consistently and effortlessly for editors and end users.

MANUAL ENTRY OF EVENTS IN DRUPAL

The most noticeable change in Patch will be the ability to manually enter Event items in your Drupal admin site. We still recommend using the Duke Event Calendar as your primary source for events, and then pulling event information into your site via feeds. However, we have learned this workflow is not ideal for everyone. Users will now be able to enter events through Drupal, Duke Event Calendar feeds, or a mix of both methods.

OTHER FEATURED UPDATES

Patch will also include updates such as:

1. Users with the User Manager role will be able to grant the Site Administrator role to other users
2. Workflow enhancements for adding Content Blocks on Story content type
3. Secondary sidebar navigation will include the top-level landing page
4. Correcting bugs with anchor links and media files in Link fields
5. Usability improvements to the admin interface
6. Making front-end styling elements more consistent across content blocks
    

Piper

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This release prioritizes new features requested by our customers, with an emphasis on frequently requested items, button link changes, and third-party integrations.

RESOURCE CONTENT TYPE

As the first step toward replacing the existing Document content type, Piper will introduce a new Resource content type. Resources will allow a broader range of file types and additional fields, and it will more closely align with the content needs of our users. Documents will not be removed until customers have been given ample opportunity to manually migrate their Document items over to Resources.

CUSTOMIZABLE LIST PAGES

Content Type List Pages display a list of all items of a specific content type. These pages are automatically generated by the system and only viewable on your front-end production website.

Piper will allow site admins to customize the titles and URL aliases of list pages. For example, the "Staff" page (example: sanford.duke.edu/staff), which displays a list of all Profiles on the site, could be renamed "Stakeholders" or "Office Directory." The URL could also be updated from /staff to /stakeholders or /office-directory. Site admins can also deactivate any unneeded list pages.

The content of these pages will remain the same.

OTHER FEATURED UPDATES

Piper will also include updates such as:

1. Buttons links, in both the Button content block and built into other content blocks, can point to email addresses (also known as "mailto" links) or media items
2. Integration with SmugMug and Tableau
3. An RSS feed for upcoming Events
4. Story content type items will display related stories tagged with the same Category terms

Deployment

Both Patch and Piper are expected to go live in July 2022. When both releases are ready, they will be seamlessly rolled out to all Sites Pro live, staging, and content/admin websites. We will post an update on this website, as well as on the Sites Pro Microsoft Teams channels. For further details on either release, please contact the Sites Pro team.