August 2017 – ITS Drupal Services

ITS is happy to announce the immediate availability of UT Drupal Kit 2.9, the ninth maintenance release for our University distribution since the inclusion of the Forty Acres theme and the Page Builder module.

The 2.9 release includes a new Drupal core release and updates to several contrib modules, the ability to include site-specific settings via an include file, and miscellaneous small improvements and bug fixes.

DRUPAL 7.56 AND CONTRIB UPDATES

UT Drupal Kit 2.9 includes the version 7.56 of Drupal Core, which is a security release that addresses a moderately critical issue related to anonymous file uploads into the private file system. Please review the release notes before updating to check for any issues that may affect your site.

This release also includes updated versions of the following contributed modules:

Caption Filter
IMCE
Media
Memcache
Panels
Rules
Video Filter
Views
Views Bulk Operations
Workbench Access

Of these modules, only Media, Views, and Video Filter are enabled by default in the UT Drupal Kit.

Several of these updates require database updates, so be sure to run available updates via https://example.com/update.php or drush updb after upgrading your site’s codebase.

Two of these contrib module updates merit special attention:

The Media module update addresses a previously identified issue related to apply links on images inserted via the Media button in the WYSIWYG editor. This new Media release does now allow linking Media-inserted images, but enabling this capability requires making a change to your text format settings. Please see the 2.9 Release Notes article on our documentation wiki for details.
The Views module update to version 7.x-3.16 is described by the Views maintainers as a “rather major bug release,” so should be tested thoroughly for regressions, particularly related to CSS class names. Please review the module release notes for details.

ALLOWING FOR SITE-SPECIFIC SETTINGS FILE

Site owners wishing to use Drupal’s settings.php file for their own purposes–such as hard-coding site settings via the $conf array, or for implementing environment detection logic for environment-specific setting overrrides–have been challenged by the fact that we include a settings.php file in the UT Drupal Kit distribution. For Pantheon site owners, this means manual resolution of a git merge conflict for every upstream update. For non-Pantheon site owners, it means that updates to the Drupal Kit’s settings.php file must be manually merged into their own settings.php file.

To improve developers’ experience regarding this issue, there is now a conditional include at the bottom of the default UTDK sites/default/settings.php file that will load a file called site-settings.php if it is found in the same directory. This can be used for implementing site-specific settings changes such as exposing additional block types to the Page Builder layout editor, or overriding which types of social media accounts are available in the Social Media Links field or the sitewide Social Media accounts configuration.

There is an example file located at sites/default/example.site-settings.php which can be copied/renamed to sites/default/site-settings.php, and includes commented-out examples of the previously described configuration customizations.

Please note that the previously-existing include for local-settings.php is still in place, and comes after site-settings.php, meaning that settings from local-settings.php will still continue to override all other settings.

MISCELLANEOUS IMPROVEMENTS

A change to the Forty Acres theme’s CSS improves the color-contrast ratio of the text and background colors of the UT Drupal Kit’s mobile menu display.
Fields with no data will no longer display as available to be placed via the Layout Editor provided by the Page Builder module.
The placement of the Google Tag Manager snippet has been moved in order to comply with Google’s best practice recommendation that the <script> element be located inside the <head> element and that the <noscript> element be located immediately following the opening <body> tag.
- Please note that this change means that the Google Tag Manager module can no longer track pageviews in the Seven administrative theme. If tracking of administrative pageviews is required, site owners should use a custom admin theme.
The Page Builder “Resource” field would not allow entry of resource links without a headline field, but the headline field was not marked as required. This has been resolved by allowing the entry of resource links only, without an accompanying headline.
Custom blocks placed in the sidebar region of Page Builder templates are now styled more consistently with other field blocks placed in the same region.

BUG FIXES

Fixed an issue in which the “Featured Events” block would not display a solid background color when placed in a region with a background accent.
Fixed an issue in which custom content types containing a non-alphanumeric character would not display fields correctly in the layout editor.

HOW TO UPDATE THE UT DRUPAL KIT

Complete instructions and download links for updating a UT Drupal Kit site are available on the documentation wiki. Pantheon site dashboards that use the UT Drupal Kit distribution should see the upstream updates available now; see the Pantheon documentation for more information on applying upstream updates.

Please review the changelog and special release notes thoroughly, and always make backups of your code, files, and database before proceeding with an update!

NEXT RELEASES

The UT Drupal Kit is released on bi-monthly maintenance release schedule, with releases targeted for the second Tuesday of the month. The planned schedule for the remainder of the 2017 calendar year is:

October 10, 2017 – UT Drupal Kit 7.x-2.10
December 12, 2017 – UT Drupal Kit 7.x-2.11

Any adjustments to this schedule will be announced on this blog and on the UT Drupal users mailing list.

If you have questions or concerns about the UT Drupal Kit, please feel free to email us at drupal-kit-support@utlists.utexas.edu.

With the 7.x-2.9 update of the UT Drupal Kit, astute developers will notice a new file in the document root of their git repo called pantheon.upstream.yml, whose contents look like this:

# IMPORTANT NOTE:

# Do not edit this file unless you are doing so in your custom upstream repository.

# Override the defaults specified here in a site-specific `pantheon.yml` file.

# For more information see: https://pantheon.io/docs/pantheon-upstream-yml

api_version: 1

php_version: 5.6

This change was announced as part of Pantheon’s move to making PHP 7 the default version of PHP for all WordPress and Drupal 8 sites. The pantheon.upstream.yml file allows maintainers of custom upstreams such as the UT Drupal Kit to keep the default PHP version for their site pegged at 5.6.

I’m already using PHP 7 in my UT Drupal Kit site. How does this affect me?

If you have already specified PHP 7 as the default version in a pantheon.yml file in your site repository, nothing will change. Configuration options defined in pantheon.yml override any defined in pantheon.upstream.yml.

My Drupal 7 site is on Pantheon, but doesn’t use the UT Drupal Kit upstream. How does this affect me?

Since Drupal 7 is not 100% compatible with PHP 7, this same pantheon.upstream.yml file is also included in Pantheon’s base Drupal 7 upstream repository. So you should have already seen this file show up as a commit waiting to be merged from the Drupal 7 upstream.

Again, no action should be needed on your part in order to maintain the status quo — if you had already put a pantheon.yml file in place to upgrade your site to PHP 7, it will override the pantheon.upstream.yml file. If you do not have a pantheon.yml file in place, your site would have already been using PHP 5.5 or 5.6, and this new file will simply preserve that as the default going forward.

I’m using the UT Drupal Kit on UT Web or a VM. How does this affect me?

The pantheon.upstream.yml file is not included as part of the standalone UT Drupal Kit download, so this does not affect sites that are not hosted on Pantheon.

Will the UT Drupal Kit ever default to PHP 7 on Pantheon?

Probably not until we have a Drupal 8 version of the Kit.

As discussed in our previous post, “PHP 7, the UT Drupal Kit, and You!” there are sufficient unknowns with regard to total compatibility with Drupal core, all of the contrib modules included with the Drupal Kit, and the wide range of customizations already present in deployed sites, that we are not comfortable making this the default version.

We do have a number of Drupal Kit-based sites maintained by ITS that are running on PHP 7 without problems. If you are interested in trying this for yourself, feel free to experiment with creating a pantheon.yml file of your own and deploying PHP 7 to your DEV (or better yet, a multidev!) environment and putting your site through its paces.