Weekly update – 21 May 2021

[ryan]

The UserActivity Pro module in ProDevTools was upgraded this week so that it now uses the Javascript Beacon API, enabling quick and reliable identification of when a user has finished a particular activity. It also now keeps track of when an activity is visible to the user or the window is hidden (like minimized or in a different tab), and it is able to report how many unsaved changes a user has made. All of this is visible from the Access > Activity menu in the admin. 

On the core side, there have been minor updates, so no version bump this week. But there are still a couple new PRs and useful things to look at in the commit log.

The plan for next week: Bernhard Baumrock has been working on a PR that makes it very simple to modify and recompile the CSS of our AdminThemeUikit module... like as simple as placing an admin.less file in /site/templates/ directory. I'll save the details for next week, but after using it a bit here I have to say it's very cool. It also makes it really simple to upgrade the Uikit version. Previously I'd been following the build process as outlined in the Uikit instructions and often found myself in a state of confusion with npm errors and strange dependencies, needing upgrades for unidentifiable tools and producing incoherent warnings that never went away and left me with little confidence in the process. Perhaps it was because I started all this back when Uikit 3 was still beta, but the result was that I didn't much like upgrading Uikit or recompiling our AdminThemeUikit CSS, and I don't think anyone else did either. It made it a little difficult for our AdminThemeUikit module to achieve its original mission of being a simple module that many would extend and build from. Well, Bernhard has found a way to skip over all that nonsense and made it much simpler for all of us, so that AdminThemeUikit can finally be what it set out to be. I look forward to integrating this PR hopefully this coming week and think it means a lot of good things for our admin. 

Also, huge thanks to Pete for upgrading our forums this week! It's a great upgrade. 

[Ivan Gretsky]

Cool! This thing that you and @bernhard are working on is something many of us are waiting. And it is in line with the plans we've been discussing in the beginning of the year. Great to see them become reality.

Another nice thing I spotted looking through the commit log is the ability to define a custom folder for Creditor plugins. In fact there are a lot of things worth mentioning in this log recently, that does not make it to the blog posts or these announcements. In some of his weekly issues @teppo goes through the github commits in detail. I personally really enjoy it. 

[LMD]

Another like for the CKEditor plugin custom folder change!

Regarding the download page of the website: I suspect this may have been mentioned before, but the displayed version still appears to be stuck on 3.0.174, when we are actually on version 3.0.178.

Edited May 22, 2021 by LMD
Clarification

[szabesz]

2 hours ago, LMD said:

I suspect this may have been mentioned before

You are right ? It has been, a lot of times. It is a know shortcoming we have to live with, so to speak.