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UT Drupal Kit

UT Drupal Kit 3.10.0 Release

This is the second of four releases in the UT Drupal Kit’s planned transition to Drupal 10. The next planned step is to update all UTDK sites to CKEditor 5 in the planned 3.11 release scheduled for March 2023. Please see UT Drupal Kit’s Roadmap to Drupal 10 for more details.

UT Drupal Kit 3.10.0 is a bi-monthly maintenance release for the University of Texas at Austin’s custom distribution of the Drupal web content management system.

In addition to the usual mix of bugfixes and visual improvements, the major change in this release is the update to version 9.5 of Drupal core. See Drupal core update below for additional details.

This release also includes a fix for the issue previously described in PSA – Issue with page cloning can cause data loss which could potentially cause data loss on pages which had originally been cloned from other Flex Pages. See Bugfix for data loss related to page cloning below for additional details on the fix and how to check whether your site experienced any data loss.

Callouts for the most impactful changes follow below. For full details of all issues included in this release, please refer to the changelog on the release notes, which links to the corresponding GitHub issues.

Drupal core update

The 3.10.0 release incorporates the most recent release of Drupal core for the 9.5 minor release branch, bringing it from version 9.4.8 to 9.5.2.

This minor-version update should not introduce any visual changes to existing sites, but is the next step of the roadmap for the Drupal Kit’s planned update to Drupal 10 in May 2023.

For more information about Drupal 10 and the schedule for that change, please see UT Drupal Kit’s Roadmap to Drupal 10.

Here are the release notes for all Drupal core releases inclusive in this release:

As originally communicated on December 15, 2022, a bug in previous versions of UTDK 3 meant that there were specific scenarios in which page cloning in UT Drupal Kit 3 could result in permanent loss of content.

Note

This scenario only applies to Drupal content types which use Layout Builder, such as the “Flex Page” content type included in the UT Drupal Kit. Pages which do not use Layout Builder are NOT vulnerable to this issue.

The scenario was:

  1. Clone an existing page “A” to a new page “B”
  2. Delete original page “A”
  3. Any blocks on page “B” which were originally cloned from the now-deleted page “A” will disappear. This data is not recoverable.

UTDK 3.10.0 includes a change which will prevent any future data loss from occuring in that scenario. However, it does not address any blocks which may have been lost due to already-deleted pages. In order to evaluate whether your site was impacted by this bug prior to the new release, there is a new “Missing Block Report” available at Configuration > Content authoring > Drupal Kit configuration > Missing Block Report (/admin/config/content/utexas/missing).

If the “Missing Block Report” does not show that any pages or blocks are impacted, no further action is necesssary. The underlying bug which caused this problem has been fixed, and this issue should never occur again in the future.

If a site has missing blocks, the report will indicate which pages and blocks are impacted so that they can be remediated. The missing content from those blocks has already been permanently deleted from the site, so the only available course of action is to remove the missing blocks from the page layout.

For consultation on possible strategies for retrieving missing block content, please email drupal-kit-support@utlists.utexas.edu to open a support ticket.

Contributed module updates

The following contributed modules are updated in this release:

Modules included with the UT Drupal Kit installation profile

Modules included with the News add-on

Modules included with the Event add-on

Updating an existing codebase

Please visit the UT Drupal Kit 3 documentation for complete release notes and instructions for updating an existing codebase using Composer. Always be sure to check for available database updates after updating the codebase.

How do I get started with UTDK 3?

The first thing anyone interested in starting with UTDK 3 should do is to head over to the documentation site:

https://drupalkit.its.utexas.edu/docs/

The “What is the UT Drupal Kit?” chapter contains detailed explanations of what the Kit contains, as well as a list of differences between versions 2 and 3.

The “Getting Started” chapter includes technical requirements for running version 3, as well as detailed instructions for setting up an environment on your own local workstation, a LAMP server, or Pantheon.

If you run into problems or have questions, please check the “Support” page for available support options.

Next releases

The 3.x (Drupal 9) branch of the UT Drupal Kit is updated on a bi-monthly maintenance release schedule, with releases targeted for the second Tuesday of odd-numbered months. The next planned release is UT Drupal Kit 3.11.0, due in March 2023. Please see Release Schedule for UT Drupal Kit for more details.

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.