New Search Engine option: Automatic “noindex” tags
Sometimes old or stale content can show up in Google results, even after it’s been archived or removed from the LiveWhale sitemap. Now, you can configure per-module TTLs for events, blurbs, forms, galleries, and news stories that will automatically add a robots “noindex” meta tag to each item after it’s passed a certain age. You could set it to an hour, a week, a year—whatever you’d like. Then, after that time has passed for each item, its URL should get removed the next time it gets re-indexed by Google or other search engines. [docs]
New Redirects option: Notes
When adding redirects to LiveWhale CMS, you can now make private notes in the new optional “Notes” field. This is a handy way to remind yourself the purpose of a redirect, or jot down a date when you know you can come back and delete it. [docs]
New Theming option: Customize “scroll-to-top” behavior
Certain actions in LiveWhale—loading a new event view in the calendar, or submitting an inline form—change the page content and scroll to ensure the new content is visible in the user’s viewport. Sometimes, though, fixed or sticky headers in your design can overlap content in these “scroll-to-top” actions. Now, you can use theme CSS to customize one or more pixel offsets (can be different in each responsive breakpoint) to ensure scroll-to-top never collides with your sticky site header. [docs: events] [docs: forms]
New API option: Location group IDs and titles
The /live/json/places endpoint now provides the group ID (gid) for each saved location, and you can request an optional response_field for group_title to get the full group name. [docs]
New Widget option: Event Types as links
If you include “categories” widget format variable in your events widgets, it’s always included a text-only list of event types. Now, you can optionally configure that variable to link to calendar results matching each event type using the new config option USE_CATEGORY_LINKS_IN_EVENTS_WIDGETS (this will become default behavior in LiveWhale 3.0). [docs]
Behavior adjustments
- Fixed an issue where browsing Linked Calendars from all groups and clicking “10 events” wouldn’t show results if the Linked Calendar was owned by another group. Clicking that link now switches you into the owning group of the Linked Calendar.
Bugs
- Fixed a PHP 8.1 incompatibility between curl and SSL that could prevent the frontend page cache from updating.
- Fixed an issue where using “Remove tag…” from the “With checked items…” dropdown could erroneously remove all tags, instead of just the one you selected.
- Fixed an issue where events with custom fields that have is_details=true might not enforce title linking in cases where the custom field has data to show in details view.
- Addressed an XSS vulnerability affecting /live/resource stylesheet and script URLs.
- Fixed an issue where choosing from a library of images using grid view could cause two actions when clicking a thumbnail (selecting the image and previewing it).
- Fix an issue, introduced in 2.20.0, that could prevent the calendar setting enable_home_view=true from working as intended.
- Improved page cache refreshing across multiple web nodes when custom URLs and custom details templates are used.
- Fixed an issue where certain clean-css warnings were appearing in rendered CSS.
Developer options
- Added support for <button> to be used in place of <a href> in the calendar scroll link component.
Behind-the-scenes
- Reverted a security rule update from 2.20.2 that had negatively affected the Upgrade Pull process.
- Updated a performance improvement for staggering Linked Calendar syncing to work with Ubuntu 24.04.
- Silenced a number of erroneous PHP warnings to improve usefulness of error logs.
- Improved database performance with some query optimizations.
Release date: August 17, 2025