This release includes a big new feature—customizable URLs for dynamic content—as well as UI improvements and bug fixes.
New feature: Customizable details URLs
We’re excited to be rolling out an often-requested change that we hope will make zero difference to some of you and a huge difference to others: customizable URLs for events, profiles, news, forms, files, and more [docs].
What we mean is—for everyday editors who just want to post their thing and go, the experience in 2.10.0 should be very familiar. For marketing folks who want /live/news/new-science-center (instead of /50843-announcing-the-new-science-center-funded-by), or for faculty profiles where you want to link to /live/profiles/emily-post (instead of /1098-emily-post), all that is now possible in this latest release.
Like with all of LiveWhale, we’ve put a lot of thought into making the editing experience as smooth and intuitive as possible. There is a fair amount happening behind the scenes, though—previous versions of each URL will redirect to the current one, and administrators can choose to override or delete existing custom URLs—which is all spelled out in the documentation. As you start test-driving this new feature on your development server, feel free to reach out to support@livewhale.com if you run into any questions.
More useful save success messages
After saving content, the success message now includes a consistent Edit button, as well as a View button for content that has a corresponding front-end view (labeled “Preview” when that content is hidden).
Before:
After:
New filtering option: Scheduled content
When managing news, events, or any content that allows you to schedule a future go-live, you can now filter in the sidebar by Status = Scheduled in addition to Live and Hidden.
Automatic improvement: Sharper resized images
When adding an image that later gets resized on a page or as a widget result, LiveWhale now runs automatic optimizations to improve the sharpness of those resulting rendered JPG and WebP images.
Accessibility improvements
Fixed an issue where the “Other group settings” accordion on the group editor wasn’t expandable from a keyboard or screen reader.
Behavior adjustments
When using a widget that requires images (require_image=true), events that reference an External Image from a linked calendar will now be included alongside events that have had an image added in LiveWhale.
Bugs
Fixed bug that broke category and tag links on the calendar’s list views, both in the calendar and when opened in a new window.
Fixed two bugs introduced in Safari 16.4: one that disallowed use of the calendar theming variable “group” (by auto-replacing it with “obj.group” in rendered calendar components), and another in the widget editor that had resulted in “undefined” appearing in the default group setting for new widgets.
Fixed an issue where the manager could sometimes show an erroneous time for story publish dates.
Cached galleries are now immediately updated when individual images are updated in ways that may impact gallery display (e.g., caption or credit changes).
LiveWhale Calendar and Storyteller: Fixed a bug where editing a saved widget with no group set would auto-fill the current group. (This default behavior now only applies to newly-created widgets.)
LiveWhale CMS Only
Fixed an edge-case issue that prevented the 404 page from receiving theme styling in certain scenarios.
Fixed an issue where very large page revision histories could run out of memory when being viewed.
Developer options
Added a new setting FILTER_USING_LOCAL_DATE_FORMAT to allow widget and API requests to use a consistent format when enabled, regardless of dashes vs slashes. This means US timezones can use mm-dd-yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy and European/Australian timezones can use dd-mm-yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy. [docs]
