AP Style Date/Time Formatting
LiveWhale has a multitude of configurable date and time formatting options, but this release makes it easier to enforce AP Style across-the-board with a single setting.
Default: January 10, 2024, 5:00pm
AP Style: Jan. 10, 2024, 5 p.m.
When $_LW->CONFIG['USE_AP_STYLE']=true; is enabled in your global.config.php file, every widget, calendar view, and API result will follow the AP Style rules. [docs]
Accessibility improvements
LiveWhale 2.9.0 includes a suite of styling and performance updates to improve our back-end compliance with WCAG 2.1 (previously we used WCAG 2.0 as our benchmark).
The most noticeable change is darker outlines around interactive form elements to help users with low vision, but other changes include:
- New styling for the Star icon (it gets a bold outline when checked) so it’s more perceivable by colorblind users or those with low vision.
- Marking required fields in back-end forms with an asterisk and including an instructive note “Fields marked * are required.” Also adding aria-required=”true” for screen readers.
- Adding screen-reader labels to icons in list view (tags, linked items, privacy padlocks).
- Event editor buttons for “Cancel Event” and “Add RSVP” now update based on user actions (“Uncancel Event” / “Remove RSVP”).
- Adding stronger, more consistent focus styling to all back-end form elements, with particular attention given to checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-downs, and WYSIWYG text areas.
- Updating WYSIWYG area iframe titles to match the inner editable area’s aria-label, so screen reader users can more easily know which field they are editing.
- Front-end: Adding an aria-live region around the month header of the mini-cal date browser so it’s more apparent to screen reader users when they are navigation between months.
Behavior adjustments
- Added support for Twitter meta tags in LiveWhale powered pages and content (og:title, og:description, and og:image will be included also as twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image). These were already supported via og: metatags, but now LW will override site-wide twitter meta tags that might be included in your theme with specific information about current page or content.
WYSIWYG editing
- This release adds a new config option WYSIWYG_IMAGE_SHOW_CAPTION_DEFAULT – when set to true, any time your editors insert an image in an editable area, the checkbox for displaying the caption will default to true (see example code in livewhale/client/sample.global.config.php).
Bugs
- Fixed pagination in panel used to display content items such as images, widgets, and files when inserting those types into a page or editor.
- Fixed an issue where certain non-publishers would not see their content listed in the backend manager.
- Fixed an issue where adding or saving a group wouldn’t always immediately clear the cached toolbar group switcher for all users.
- Fixed an issue that prevented the header HTML tag from being used in a format arg from the widget editor.
- Fixed an issue where CSS classes applied to an inline widget format could be inadvertently removed when editing via the WYSIWYG editor.
- Fixed an issue which could cause format args to erroneously be removed from image widgets when credits or captions contained single quoted content.
- Fixed an issue where hiding repeating instances from an events widget, along with returning additional optional fields, could cause results to be inconsistent over repeat requests for the same data.
- Fixed an obscure bug which could cause certain shorthand XPHP vars to not be parsed correctly.
- Fixed a WYSIWYG bug that trucated some field data when mousing over the field on page load.
- Fixed an issue where certain accented characters could be ignored in frontend calendar group configurations.
- Fixed a duplicate ID on the Edit User page that could affect custom scripting or styling.
- Renamed “Weather ID” to “Weather Code” on the Edit Group page since some browsers were seeing “ID” in the label and auto-filling usernames in that field.
- Fixed an issue where group=me was erroneously set as the default for new LiveWhale Calendar and Storyteller widgets.
- LiveWhale CMS Only
- Fixed an issue that prevented Insert > Content layout from working when moving between editable areas of a page.
Behind-the-scenes
- Improved performance with a weekly cleanup of the widget cache.
- Updated internal API requests to use JSON API v2.
Release date: March 10, 2023