2026Q3
Incremental improvements and quality uplifts across the whole platform, polishing it into a completely production-ready accelerator.
Functionality
- Custom SVG icons: Custom SVG icons can now be added as media.
- Font management: Fonts can now be uploaded as media. This allows for improved privacy, no longer requiring the use of Google Fonts CDN.
- Translations: Improved resources by introducing translated documents, complete with language-specific headings and summary text.
- Translation content type: A simple listing page, displaying all translated documents for a specific language. Each document listed has been linked back to the resource the document is assigned to.
- Audience filter: A simple select list allowing users to select an audience.
- Footnotes: Footnotes can easily be added to content now by using 1
- No code favicons: Favicons now configured with metatags. No theming needed.
- FOI listing: New collection with facets and search. FOI items are displayed as a summary.
- Datatable: A new component allows CSVs to be displayed as interactive tables.
- Universal item dates: A Date field is now included across all eleven view modes for the item paragraph.
- Search result: URLs now read ?keyword= instead of ?keywords=.
Presentation
- Hero: The Hero component lets you pair content with an image. Its flexible content area supports multiple nested components.
- Patterns: Colour palette-aware, lightweight SVG pattern backgrounds. Patterns are defined as taxonomy terms, allowing site editors to expand their pattern library.
- Footer redesign: The footer is now more coherent.
- Teaser icon: New view mode added to support compact lists with icons. Works for downloads, Nodes and Items.
- CTA design: Personalised CTA tweaked to have better button placement for more obvious interactions.
- Provide feedback: Button moved from a section (costly in space) to the footer.
- Banner functionality: Support for background images and a variety of masks on the image.
- Related region: Page template updated to support a standardised related region for content.
- Image card Background is transparent: Better-looking cards allow background imagery to partly shine through.
- Sidebar nav parent: Stronger navigation with the parent link included in the menu.
- Background Image Modifier: The famous Ken Burns effect comes to images, allowing better storytelling with hero images.
- TOC Smooth scrolling: Page now scrolls smoothly.
- Content column gaps: Increased spacing between columns to clearly delineate main content from the sidebar.
- New card date component: Dates display as a full-width band on narrow cards and a calendar tab on wider cards.
- Enhanced file links: File links consistently show a download icon, filename, type, and size, with a new "Download" heading on basic pages.
- User profile updates: A dedicated intro block has been added to the top of user profile pages.
- Visual / UX changes: A visible outline marks the decision flow step that receives focus; map markers no longer show the two-tone focus ring.
- Lists: Second-level list items show dashes (bulleted) or lowercase letters (numbered), on the page and in the editor.
Accessibility
- Banner Print and Listen: New functionality has been brought into the banner in line with common government patterns.
- Slider refactor: Navigation overhauled with Next/Previous in the bottom-right, pagination in the bottom-left (hidden on mobile), and improved Swiper accessibility.
- Accessible video backgrounds: Videos now feature a visible pause/play button and automatically display a fallback image if a user requests reduced motion.
- Clickable image comparisons: The comparison slider divider now responds to clicks, taps, and keyboard arrows, removing the restriction of drag-only interactions.
- WYSIWYG Semantic HTML: Wider range of tags supported for abbr, time, address, dl, dt, dd, cite.
- Asynchronous audience filters: Filtering updates the page immediately without a reload and triggers an accessible toast notification.
- Combobox search suggestions: Search acts as an accessible combobox, announcing suggestion counts and highlighting hints to screen readers.
- Zoom & short viewport support: Sticky elements (headers, footers, sidebars) release and scroll normally on zoomed screens or short viewports to preserve reading space.
- Distinct navigation landmarks: Menus now have specific accessible names (e.g., "In this section") instead of sharing generic titles.
- Focus: Move focus into the lightbox on open and back to its link on close.
- Transcripts: Add a transcript field to the GeoChart paragraph; also drop the redundant render filter from the Chart transcript.
- Decision flow focus: Move focus to the new step on decision flow answers, Back, Restart and form submit, and outline the focused step; also attach its libraries from the paragraph preprocess instead of globally and move its styles out of legacy/.
- Add keyboard and screen reader support to the map and remove the markers from the two-tone focus ring; also fix the settings loop that stopped at the first missing map and re-initialised maps on re-attach.
- Wrap the search result count in a paragraph and move focus to it after an exposed form is submitted.
Fixes
- Theme Import libraries dynamically: More efficient management of theme libraries.
- Immediate logo updates: Logos use Drupal's image field pipeline for automatic cache-busting, updating instantly upon replacement.
- Uncropped media defaults: Default media images are no longer forced into a 16:9 crop and display at a medium responsive size.
- Clearer help text: Editor instructions on roughly two dozen fields have been reworded for better clarity.
- Favicon: Remove the hardcoded favicon, manifest and theme colour tags from html.html.twig and the theme's favicons/ directory, which duplicated and shadowed the Metatag output.
- ReadSpeaker: Fix ReadSpeaker not loading by calling ReadSpeaker.loadCore() once its script arrives.
- Webform alignement: Fix the misaligned side-by-side webform checkbox in the admin theme and the doubled webform info alert, by dropping webform's message info CSS.
- Meta tags: Correct broken, empty and wrong meta tags in the metatag defaults (og:type, updated time, thumbnail style, site name, media description, DC identifier, audience/intent/topic keys); remove the Goal field, vocabulary, custom tag and role permissions; hide the banner background fields on the article type and audience displays.
- Webform: side-by-side checkboxes line up in the admin form, and info messages show one alert instead of two.
- Goal field: The Goal field has been removed from every content edit form.
Footnotes
- Footnote description ↩︎