New ways of managing Linked Calendars
Linked Calendars make it easy to consume iCal feeds from external sources and events stay in sync with LiveWhale, and LiveWhale 2.11.0 adds two new ways of managing your Linked Calendars.
First, for when you have edited feed-wide overrides (either via the Edit linked calendar tool, or using a custom module) a new admin-only option “Save calendar and reset all events in feed” is available from the editor. When clicked—following a confirmation box—this will remove all existing events and re-load them fresh from the Linked Calendar, so any new customizations get applied to the whole feed.
We’ve noticed some iCal sources (including other LiveWhale sites) only publish upcoming events, and events that vanish from the Linked Calendar source iCal are removed on each hourly sync. A new Linked Calendars setting “Keep past events” transforms iCal imported events into native LiveWhale events if they have passed.
Spam-fighting with event RSVP captchas
LiveWhale has long supported Google Recaptcha and custom captchas for form submissions and public event/news submissions. Event RSVPs had not been included in this, but we’ve noticed an uptick in spam submissions to LiveWhale Calendar Event RSVP forms over the last few months. As such, we’ve extended existing captcha support to event RSVPs.
More flexible widget headers
When creating widgets, the optional built-in “Header” has always been automatically added before your results list. But we’ve seen this doesn’t always meet the design needs of heavily-customized widgets, and developers would often end up putting the header text straight into the widget wrapper (format_widget).
Starting in LiveWhale 2.11.0, you can now use “header” or “header_clean” in the widget wrapper formatting (format_widget) to specify the precise location of the widget header in the HTML output. This makes it easier to design widgets and widget templates that will allow for user-customized headers (<arg id=”header”>My Header Override</arg>) that get placed exactly where you want in the design.
LiveWhale CMS: Updates to the “Insert widget” modal
When inserting widgets onto a page, you may find that you want to make edits to the underlying saved widget. Two small additions to the Insert/edit widget modal help with that.
Users with the ability to edit widgets will now see a link to edit any saved widget when double-clicking it from the page editor. Additionally, you can now manually refresh the widget preview from that same modal, in the event that widget settings have been changed in another window.
Behavior adjustments
- Event RSS feeds now automatically include the values of custom fields, matching ICAL and JSON feeds.
- Relaxed the limit on maximum length of args such as format and format_widget.
- When adding a new link using the search tool, the wysiwyg link dialog will now auto-fill empty link text with the item or page title.
- LiveWhale CMS only: It is now possible to bulk reassign templates for pages without a current template, provided they do not have special field mapping needs.
Bugs
- Fixed an issue that could sometimes cause repeating events with a late start time from creating the last instance of a repeating series.
- Fixed an issue where deleting and restoring an event series could cause per-event instance RSVPs to be lost.
- Fixed an issue that caused some multi-group options to appear for users with access to only one group.
- Fixed an issue where an event with multiple custom URL changes might not always redirect from a past URL to the currently active URL.
- Fixed an issue that could cause requests for details on dynamic content that should 404 to appear as blank content instead.
- Fixed outdated calendar requests to redirect them to the new calendar instead of issuing a 404.
- Fixed a bug with URL previews on the edit page (introduced in 2.10.9).
- Fixed a possible memory issue in the JSON endpoint responses.
- Fixed an issue with editing inline images when using the id=placeholder functionality introduced in 2.10.8.
- Fixed an edge-case bug affecting calendar pagination links for group-filtered events.
- LiveWhale CMS only
- When editing a navigation, LiveWhale will now redirect to ensure you are accessing the hostname that matches the current group’s group directory.
- Fixed an issue where navigation changes might appear on the frontend site with a delay.
- Fixed an issue that could prevent .gov sites from being properly resolved for link checking on some servers.
Behind-the-scenes
- Added a new setting DATABASE_HOST_READ to support an additional read-only database. (Will require hardware changes implemented on a case-by-case basis by the LiveWhale Support team.)
- Added a diagnostic check for an edge-case failure of APCU variable caching.
Release date: October 06, 2023