The last few months have been quieter for our WordPress development, with the efforts put in by everyone during 2020 and 2021 paying off with the result being much more stable services and subsequently fewer support requests coming in. We are however always working to improve the quality of the code which runs our websites, add in new features, and support site administrators as best as possible.
Help!
If you encounter any problems with any of these updates or anything else please drop us a support ticket to helpdesk@kent.ac.uk
With this in mind we have made a number of improvements to our WordPress servers which include:
Performance boost
Whilst cleaning up our codebase and trying to make things more efficient we found a series of functions which were being called throughout the site, on the front-end and back-end. As these are only required whilst editing content we have stopped them from being called whilst vising the website itself. This has resulted in a noticeable performance boost in page loading times across our sites.
404
Our 
404 ‘Sorry, we’re a bit lost’ page template was getting a bit old and long in the tooth. Its never great to be sent to a none existent page, either by mistake or because it has been removed, but at least now you are presented with a more attractive error message which replicates that found on kent.ac.uk
Panel background colour names
We always found it a little odd keeping with the legacy names used for choosing a panel background colour; primary, secondary, etc. They never told you what the colour was. So, inline with kent.ac.uk, we have changed these to: Dark blue, Light blue, Light grey, etc. Hopefully you’ll find these easier to understand, and rest assured your existing panel colours will remain selected, we have just changed the labels used.
Panel tabs
We are trying to organise the content on panels ever more into neat, appropriately title tabs. We have added these tabs to even more panels recently, re-titled some, and moved some fields around to try and make more sense. We hope these changes will make it easier and more logical when using the panels and building pages.
Removal of H1 option
We have removed the H1 option from the text formatting dropdown found on all WYSIWYG editors on various panels. This change was made to ensure consistency in the page headers, partly for styling reasons, partly for screen readers. It is still possible to add a H1 tag in the ‘text’ tab of the editor, but we advise against it if at all possible
Panel updates
Cards
To give administrators the ability to create more attractive layouts with cards we have added several new options which allow you to center the panel title and description, center the cards, center the cards title and text,and remove the arrows next to the card title.
We added tabs onto this panel to try and bring it under control a little. But one result of this was the reduced width available for content. Given the horizontal layout for adding and editing cards was crowded at times we have changed this to a vertical layout. No fields have changed and you have the same controls to be able to drag and drop to reorder, it is just the appearance of the fields which has changed.
Content
Page links have been changed. We were using the wrong style and have reverted back to the blue box appearance which is correct for a group of same page anchor links.
Feature
When selecting a Call to Action we added in a ‘link type’ option to ensure the hyperlink is properly chosen and set.
People
On the people panel you can now ‘hide’ the group labels. Where you may only have one group of people for your site it seems silly to still have the label showing. By toggling this on it will hide the label and makes the panel look a lot cleaner. Additionally, we fixed an issue with the sub group dropdown where they were not being sorted correctly.
On people profiles we have added in an option to create static, non-clickable profile cards. This means that for individuals who may need to be represented but do not need a full profile page setup or linked to an external page a card is added to the people panel but it cannot be clicked on.
Script
Added a dropdown option for the content width and included a ‘window’ option. If you need to embed a large application onto a page this will hopefully give you more control over how it will look resulting in a nicer page.
Tables
Updated the sorting arrow used on the header row to match that used on kent.ac.uk.
Timeline (NEW!)
We have added a new panel to the theme, one which is available on kent.ac.uk and been ported over. This panel allows you to create a vertical list of items connected to one another, each with indicative icon, title, content, and link options.
Other fixes
There are lots of other fixes and minor tweaks many of which you won’t see. These includes changes made to our site listing panel to support work being done on a new homepage for research.kent, as well as our site directory tool used by divisional administrators.
Find documentation and examples for these panels and more within the panels section of our documentation.
As a result of all of these changes the documentation is a little out of date. Please bear with use whilst we update it. If you have any questions please do get in contact with us.
Need a new feature or functionality?
Whilst our services are not intended for ‘marketing’ orientated websites we do periodically add in features or styling in efforts to keep up with the changes being made to kent.ac.uk. But since that is often a larger undertaking we are always happy to do piecemeal feature inclusion to support administrators. If you would like a particular feature or style present on kent.ac.uk, or perhaps another type of feature or functionality please drop us an email to is-wld@kent.ac.uk and we will see if we can fit it into our regular updates.