WP Deployment 2.8.18

Our final deployment of 2023 happened today. It’s primarily a maintenance release but there are still plenty of items to make you aware of.

Enhancing Stability with Revisions Policy

The unlimited revisions per page led to massive database clutter and unwieldy pages. After consulting our WordPress community, we’ve decided to cap revisions at 15 per page. This should be sufficient for the vast majority of our users, but if you need to preserve an older version, consider making a snapshot by Duplicating the page and setting it as Draft. For more details or assistance, reach out via our Web Request form.

Elevating Accessibility Standards

Like many of you, we’ve started using Siteimprove to improve the quality of our code. A recent scan revealed some labeling and container issues with our global and department navigation. We’ve implemented code changes to address those specific issues. In our testing, our base accessibility score increased to the upper 90% range. We’re hopeful that these changes will significantly improve everyone’s score.

Shortcodes and Icon Updates

Good news for Shortcode users! We’ve revamped the text box, displaying the entire code entered for improved visibility. Additionally, a visual change you’ll notice in the footer: the Twitter bird has been replaced with the sleek letter X. Change is hard but we’re committed to staying current.

And lastly…

• We fixed a bug that prevented site admins from assigning roles to new users.
• We fixed a critical error in our “Who’s Coming Back” plugin when an invalid class year is entered.
• We updated numerous plugins.

IS has asked us to pass on word of fraudulent security advisories that are being sent via email warning of a non-existent vulnerability (CVE-2023-45124) and urging admins to install a fake plugin to address the issue. If anyone received such an email, please disregard it.

As mentioned at the outset, this is our last deployment for 2023, so we hope everyone in our WordPress community has a wonderful holiday season.