Release Planning: March 2025

Photo of the Cliff Springs trail in Grand Canyon State Park back towards the trailhead.

The March 2025 updates include the addition of new block patterns within the Pitchfork theme and direct support for Microsoft Clarity. Pitchfork People was updated to include a new grid view option for the web directory block. Also, be sure to check out our new plugin that adds ASU Awesome icons to a popular icon block for the block editor.

Pitchfork People users should plan to update the plugin and the Pitchfork theme (if in use) to the versions indicated here to fully support the styles and features included in the updated web directory block.

Updates

Enterprise Technology Unity announcements

ASU Enterprise Technology has recently refactored the location of several components within the Unity Design system’s package library. Those changes included:

  • On February 11th, ET announced that an effort to consolidate and reorganize certain React components of the Unity Design System into different packages was completed. (Slack)
  • On February 20, ET also announced that it will deploy a new cookie consent banner to all websites via the ASU GTM container and that the component-cookie-consent package would no longer be needed. (Slack)

As a result, the following actions were taken:

  • The v2.4.0 release of the Pitchfork theme pinned the component-header, component-footer and unity-bookstrap-package distributions at the last stable versions of those components prior to the launch of the reorganization effort.
  • A planned summer release for the Pitchfork theme and Pitchfork Blocks library will contain the update to the newest versions of the distributed Unity packages.
  • The cookie consent banner was removed from the Pitchfork theme with the v2.4.1 release of the theme following the late February announcement.

Package version list

  • unity-bootstrap-package from 1.15.3 ➡️ 1.20.2 (latest)
  • component-header from 2.2.5 ➡️ 2.3.3 (latest prior to deprecation)
  • component-footer from 2.2.0 ➡️ 2.2.2 (latest prior to deprecation)
  • component-cookie-consent from 2.1.0 ➡️ removed.
  • app-webdir-ui from 3.6.3 ➡️ 4.1.2 (latest prior to package consolidation)

Things to know

Web Directory

The Pitchfork People plugin updates contain further enhancements of the web-directory block.

  • The web directory block now offers end users a grid view and list view for the directory listing.
  • The default display option is configurable in the block settings.

The profile-data block had two new configurations added to the block options panel.

  • Users can now toggle the display of an email address within a profile block.
  • Users can also override the working title within a profile block.

Many thanks to the Knowledge Enterprise Web Services team and @jkcox specifically for their continued contributions to this plugin. 🎉

Theme updates

The Pitchfork theme now supports the direct addition of a tracking ID from Microsoft Clarity for easier integration with the analytics platform. You can find this option available on the Pitchfork Settings page within the admin area under the Settings menu.

  • The decision to include direct support of Microsoft Clarity in the theme was made to align with the Enterprise Brand and Strategy’s decision to discontinue usage of Hotjar due to data privacy policy concerns.
  • In a future release, we will be removing this option from the theme options panel to align further with ASU’s policies.

The pattern library was reorganized to highlight a new grouping of patterns that feature the query loop block in a layout. Additionally, two new patterns were added to the pattern library to help facilitate some common design requests. The new patterns are:

  • Story + Thumb (Row) – features a small thumbnail next to a content section and linked heading.
  • Icon + Heading – uses The Icon Block to provide an icon “prefix” before a standard heading. This is a very useful way to include an icon from Font Awesome without needing to alter the HTML output of the heading block directly.
Screen capture of the two new block patterns available in Pitchfork.

The Icon Block and ASU Awesome

As a part of this release, a new plugin was created to extend a well-adopted freely available block plugin in the WordPress ecosystem that makes it easy to use SVG icons within a block layout. The extended plugin is called The Icon Block and it is available to install directly from within the plugin admin screen.

Our extension of this plugin adds the complete set of ASU Awesome Icons to this block for easy deployment onto a page. The set of 43 icons is categorized into a few smaller collections for easier browsing. Once both plugins are installed and activated, you can see the icon collection with just a few clicks.

The new ASU Awesome Icon Block extension is available within the ASU Engineering Github repository. Updates to the plugin can be managed within an installation of WordPress via WP Pusher or Git Updater. See https://github.com/asuengineering/asu-wp-icon-block for more details.