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UT Drupal Kit

UT Drupal Kit 2.17 Release

ITS is happy to announce the immediate availability of UT Drupal Kit 2.17.2, the latest maintenance release for our University distribution of the Drupal web content management system.

PLEASE NOTE: There were 2.17.0 and 2.17.1 releases that were never formally announced, but were briefly available on ServiceNow and in the Pantheon upstream repository from Tuesday, April 9 until mid-day on Friday, April 12. The 2.17.0 release was missing a patch to the Context module that allows non-admin users to use the Layout Editor feature. The 2.17.0 and 2.17.1 releases included a .lando.yml configuration file that was removed in the final 2.17.2 release. If you updated your site during those dates, please update again to get the correct release.

The 2.17 release includes an important change to default PHP behavior for Pantheon sites, an update to Drupal Core 7.65, updates to multiple contrib modules, and one minor bug-fixes.

PHP 7.2 BY DEFAULT ON PANTHEON CUSTOM UPSTREAM

As discussed in the release announcement for version 2.15, Pantheon recently started specifying PHP 7.2 as the default PHP version in the default PHP version in the pantheon.upstream.yml file for their Drupal 7 upstream repository. At the time of that release, we chose to specify PHP 7.1 as the new default for the UTDK custom upstream on Pantheon due to deprecation notices coming from the Field Collection module under PHP 7.2.

This issue with Field Collection has now been resolved and an update to the module was included in the 2.16 release in February 2019. Accordingly, we are now updating the pantheon.upstream.yml file in the UTDK custom upstream to use PHP 7.2 as the default PHP version.

We have extensively tested the UTDK codebase with PHP 7.2, and have been running many sites under older versions of PHP 7 on Pantheon for over a year with no issues (please see “PHP 7, the UT Drupal Kit, and You” from April 2017 for additional discussion). However, any sites with custom code, additional contrib modules, or even certain configurations could still potentially uncover untested cases and encounter PHP 7.2 incompatibilities. Therefore, we strongly recommend that site owners thoroughly test this release in the DEV/TEST environments before deploying it to the LIVE environment.

If you wish to apply the upstream updates without testing PHP 7.2 compatibility for your site at this time, then you can first add a pantheon.yml file to the site repository to pin the site’s PHP version to 5.6 or 7.1 until such time as you can test and deploy PHP 7.2 to your site using Pantheon’s recommended approach. But keep in mind that PHP 5.6’s security support phase ends at the end of 2018. Pantheon will continue to offer PHP 5 support for the time being, but they will eventually remove unsupported versions of PHP from the platform.

CONTRIB UPDATES

The 2.17 release includes updates to the following contrib modules:

BUG FIXES

  • Fixed an issue that in the utexas_social_sharing module that caused the Facebook Share functionality not to work correctly.

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 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 a bi-monthly maintenance release schedule, with releases targeted for the second Tuesday of the month. The next planned release for 2019 is UT Drupal Kit 7.x-2.18, due on June 11, 2019.

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

By Paul Grotevant

Paul Grotevant is the Senior IT Manager of Web Content Management Solutions for Information Technology Services at the University of Texas at Austin.