Finally, after much hard work, the 1.20.0 release of the Platform is complete. This release was delayed by the need to create and roll out a 1.19.1 release to accommodate a security update to the underlying CMS.
Headline features:
Upgrade of both the CMS's core and modules to more recent versions.
This is a foundation step required to upgrade the Platform to use Drupal 10 before the current version (Drupal 9) reaches End of Life in November this year. There is a lot of code that requires updating to be compatible with Drupal 10 so this is very time intensive.
Luckily for subscribers, this is all done free of charge as part of the Platform's general development. The only "cost" in terms of support account balance usage will be the time required to deploy the update to sites.
Inclusion of Doc2Page integration functionality.
We've been working very hard on a new service called "Doc2Page" which accelerates the conversion of PDF and Docx files to standard web pages within the Platform. The motivation for creating Doc2Page is to help organisations move away from PDFs in favour of normal web pages, as they’re much more accessible (a good article on this is https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should-be-published-in-html-and-not-pdf/). Doc2Page is what’s known as a “headless” service in that it doesn’t have a user interface. Instead, it uses an API to receive PDF or Docx files and it returns HTML markup. To make it usable, we’ve created an initial API integration for the Platform, and we will enable it for selected clients for testing purposes.
Minor improvements:
Allow web forms to be embedded using the WYSIWYG editor in any content type.
Web forms created using the Platform's web form builder can now be included in all content types by use of the "Webform" WYSIWYG component.
Expand the Social Media Links block (commonly used in the footer of sites) to include TikTok.
This was required by Brentwood Council, so now all subscribers can benefit from the work done.
As always, all existing sites will gain this functionality over time at no additional cost.