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Version Release

The 1.17.0 release was tagged on the 9th January and is available for production usage.  Contents as follows:

Headline feature:

  • Implementation of a "Question and Answer" Directory type.

    This feature strengthens the knowledge management proposition of Intranet type sites.  Our developers regularly make use of "Q and A" type sites such as StackOverflow.com in their work.  Staff also make use of another "Q and A" type site, Reddit.com, as a general source of information and recommendations.  The strength of these sites is that it allows upvoting of answers to questions so that the most helpful or correct answers come to the fore.  Internally, we often encounter recurring questions as part of both website development and business development, and we needed to have a system to store this information effectively, allowing staff to find helpful answers quickly.  In this release, we created an initial implementation of a Directory containing "Questions" which in turn can have multiple "Answers" added to them, and for these Answers to be voted up or down by authenticated users.
Council Platform Questions and Answers functionality
A screenshot of the new "Questions and Answers" functionality.

Minor improvements:

  • Improve the usability of the admin system when hierarchically relating pages.

    This addressed a suggestion by Plymouth City Council. In the admin system, top level sections were displayed in the order they were created. This makes it hard to find the Section you're looking for in order to place a new page within it. Instead, sections will now be sorted alphabetically.
  • Further improve the logging functionality of the Platform.

    In the 1.13.0 release, we improved the logging functionality of the Platform to ensure that the logs shown in the admin system were stored on the server's disk long after they had rotated out of a site's database.  Logs are stored in individual daily files and persist for 1 year.  In this release, we further worked on logging functionality to filter out less meaningful log entries from the admin system (although all log entries still exist in the files stored on disk).  This makes it easier to see how a site is being used in terms of users logging in and out, content being created/updated/deleted, site errors etc.

Housekeeping:

  • Change the "A to Z" functionality of the Platform so that it is no longer mandatory in sites, as requested by Plymouth City Council.
  • Fix a permissions issue whereby Content Creator and Content Editor roles couldn't always edit the "Summary" field of content items if they had been created by a Site Admin role.
  • Fix a PHP 8 compatibility issue with the Forum permissions system of Intranet sites.
  • Fix a bug with multilingual sites whereby the "Last Updated" timestamp was being updated for all translations of a content item, even if only one language variant had been edited.
  • Fix a frontend styling issue with the WYSIWYG editor, whereby left/right aligning images and YouTube videos on a page can cause them to "overlap" each other.

As this release doesn't contain any security fixes, it will be installed on sites upon request.  When the next security release of the Platform is published, all sites will gain this functionality.