V.140 Release Notes

Release Highlights

• Drupal core security maintenance: upgraded to Drupal 10.6.11.
• News fixes: resolved missing social media icons and Search API issues affecting news feeds and news landing pages in faculty sites.

• Privacy updates: 

  As per the Government of Alberta's changes to Alberta’s public-sector access to information and privacy legislation, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP) has been replaced with two new pieces of legislation: the Access to Information Act (ATIA) and the Protection of Privacy Act (POPA). 

  Under the new Protection of Privacy Act (POPA), all Alberta public bodies—including UCalgary—were required to establish and maintain a comprehensive Privacy Management Program (PMP) by June 11, 2026.  

  To ensure alignment with UCalgary's PMP and compliance with the new legislation, intake points within the UCalgary Web System, including Drupal Webforms and LiveWhale RSVP forms, have been updated to reflect a new universal Notice of Collection, provided by the Access and Privacy Office.  

  For more information on our collective responsibilities under the new POPA legislation, the Access to Information Act (ATIA) and UCalgary's PMP, please visit the Legal Services website.   

• Editorial controls: removed access to add new Marketo blocks and added auto-collapse behaviour for Teams lists.
• Platform upkeep: removed BackstopJS regression testing configuration and introduced PHP 8.3-related constructor and performance improvements.

Bug fixes

• Fixed Search API issues that were causing incomplete news feed blocks and under-filled faculty news landing pages, including Science and departmental news pages.

Improvements

• Refactored custom PHP modules and themes for PHP 8.3 using shorter constructors, stronger type hints, caching, early returns, and reduced repeated entity/database calls.
• Reviewed Funding Opportunities / PeopleSoft integration automated tests. Confirmed the RDT failures were caused by local login being disabled on staging for ERP user testing; the tests passed locally.

Maintenance

• Removed the retired BackstopJS regression testing configuration now that CodeCeption regression testing is working, reducing unused test tooling and maintenance overhead.
• Applied the Drupal 10.6.11 security release, updating Drupal core from 10.6.9 along with required Symfony framework and SimpleSAML library updates.

Tasks

• Updated the Webform and Marketo privacy notice language to the POPA-compliant UCalgary Notice of Collection provided by Legal.
• Removed the ability to create new Marketo blocks ahead of the Marketo/Adobe retirement, while preserving existing block behaviour. Retirement messaging added that changes based on date and user context.
• Changed long Teams lists to be collapsed by default to reduce scrolling and improve editorial workflows.
• Added the POPA collection notice to LiveWhale registration forms so event registrations include the required privacy language, matching the approach used for Webforms.

Work in Progress 

The following work items are currently in progress:

• Ongoing improvements to the script used to disable one-off blocks, adding safety checks and addressing edge cases
• Spike to evaluate removing the dynamic news header functionality and standardizing/redirecting news URLs/feeds to improve reliability and maintainability.
• Tech debt cleanup to align enabled/disabled modules across sites based on the maintained Investigation and improvements to reduce load from large taxonomy base table queries and help prevent “MySQL server has gone away” incidents (includes initial research notes in the ticket).
• Research and planning of system architecture for future UCalgary Design System integration with Drupal.

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

If you have questions or need to report a bug or issue, let us know: https://web.ucalgary.ca/contact-us