Nov. 22, 2024

V.126 Release Notes | Gin Edition

Introducing Gin: our new and improved Drupal admin theme and authoring environment!
Screenshot of admin toolbar in drupal authoring

Since the days of Drupal 7, Seven has been the default admin theme for Drupal--powering the authoring environment for the UCalgary Web System. Seven is being phased out and will no longer be available when we move to Drupal 10, so in preparation for this upgrade, we’ve officially switched over to an updated authoring environment, powered by the Gin admin theme.  

 

Why we chose Gin 

Gin is the leading admin theme for Drupal, offering a cleaner user interface, modernized look and feel, and advanced customization—allowing us to unlock the full potential of Drupal authoring.  

The Digital Experience team went through a thorough internal review process of Drupal admin themes and vetted the available options with members of the Web Community and Web Leads Community of Practice. Our updated authoring environment also went through internal testing and was piloted on select environments to identify issues and pain points before rolling changes out across the UCalgary Web System.  

 

What does this mean for you 

The major differences between Seven and Gin are visual—the steps authors and admins take to complete tasks and create content on UCalgary Drupal sites will remain the same. 

These authoring changes have been implemented across all UCalgary Drupal environments including faculty websites, live-ucalgary, profiles.ucalgary.ca, and news.ucalgary.ca.

Before and after

Explore some examples below of Drupal authoring before and after these changes to authoring. 

Screenshot of login screen admin toolbar in drupal
Screenshot of admin toolbar in Gin authoring
Screenshot of creating a basic page in seven
Screenshot of creating a basic page in Gin authoring
Screenshot of block editor in seven
Screenshot of editing a block in Gin

Other items included in this release 

 Fixes  

  • LiveWhale event feed widget: Events not appearing in events feeds  

  • LiveWhale Google Maps integration: Google maps unable to load the location field 

  • Edit this block button not appearing on smaller devices (tablet and mobile)  

 

Enhancements 

  • Deleting a node/page will now also remove the associated blocks from the system 

  • Updates to the behaviour and focus state of form buttons to align with system button styles (applies to webforms, Marketo block, Page Filter, and Profile List block) 

  • Freeze header rows on tables in Drupal authoring (applies to authoring screens with larger tables such as: content, people, taxonomies, etc.) 

  

Other 

  • Automated tests updates and fixes 

  • Improvements and fixes to RO features: undergraduate requirements widget and awards view 

  • Automatically add newly created menus to basic page authoring  

 

 

In Progress 

Work that is currently in progress and will be included in an upcoming release.  

  • Drupal 10 upgrade  

  • News feed block caching  

 

 

For more information on the UCalgary Web System, visit web.ucalgary.ca.  

 If you have questions or need to report a bug or issue, let us know!  

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