Release planning: June 2024

Open laptop on a wooden desk next to an empty notebook.

Pitchfork People received some much-needed improvements which makes the process of building a directory easier within the block editor. The Pitchfork theme and the Pitchfork Blocks plugin also received minor updates to address a couple of bugs that were discovered in production.

Pitchfork People received some much-needed improvements which makes the process of building a directory easier within the block editor. The Pitchfork theme and the Pitchfork Blocks plugin also received minor updates to address a couple of bugs that were discovered in production.

Site engineers will need to apply the plugin updates to the Pitchfork Blocks plugin BEFORE updating the theme to avoid a possible fatal PHP error that occurs when things are updated in the incorrect order.

Updates

Supporting documentation

Updated Unity Design System packages

  • app-webdir-ui from 3.4.0 ➡️ 3.5.0 (latest)

Things to know

This month’s release focused on Pitchfork People and the behavior of some of the blocks available within that plugin.

Data-driven profile block improvements

Previously, each profile-data block that was placed onto the page resulted in a single call to the ASU Search API for the profile data. Pages that were constructed using multiple blocks of this type took an increasingly longer time to load because of the repeated need for the external data source.

With the improvements within the latest Pitchfork People release, all of these data requests to ASU Search are now bundled together according to their position within the profiles wrapper block. A single API call can now retrieve the results of multiple nested blocks within the layout resulting in faster page speeds.

Web Directory block UI improvements

The web-directory block also received a lot of attention for this plugin update. Within the block editor, you can now see a much more detailed look into how the results will display when the formal display of the director is rendered on the front end of the site.

To start with there are now names and ASURITE IDs displayed within the block in the editor instead of the previous “blue box of mystery.” The results are ordered within the block editor alphabetically by last name for convenience. Editors can also see an indication of how the pagination setting will effect the displayed results.

The web-directory block also provides additional mechanisms for excluding individual people or filtering the results to only include people within a certain category.

  • Profiles to be excluded can be input via a comma separated list in the provided field.
  • Filters are available to organize your list by expertise, employee type and campus location.
  • Editors can expose the filterable data available within each profile by using a toggle within the sidebar.

See the following document for additional information: https://comm.engineering.asu.edu/pitchfork/docs/web-directory-block

Additional Notes

The minor updates to the Pitchfork Blocks plugin and to the Pitchfork theme relocated of a pair of ACF field definitions from the plugin to the theme to make them available for more than one application. This code relocation can result in a fatal error for sites running both Pitchfork and Pitchfork Blocks if the updates are applied in the incorrect order.

Please apply the plugin updates to the Pitchfork Blocks plugin BEFORE updating the theme to avoid the error.

If the error should happen to occur on your site, recovery is a relatively straightforward process.

  • Deactivating all plugins temporarily while the updates to Pitchfork Blocks are applied.
  • If you have FTP access to your site, you can quickly deactivate all plugins by temporarily renaming the folder at /wp-content/plugins to a different name.
  • Once the theme update has been applied, rename the folder to the original name to restore all functionality.
  • See the following article for additional details: https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/disable-wordpress-plugins/