Anatomy of a Release

One core task for the developers in the Web Services department is to execute releases. Completed on a weekly or fortnightly basis, releases are a set of updates to code that patch security vulnerabilities, improve the efficiency of how websites run, fix bugs and introduce new features (these are often requested by you!)

One of the key elements of a release is making sure WordPress is up to date with the latest stable and secure version. When we run upgrades to WordPress you might notice, the next time you log in, that this page appears [click on the image to see a larger view of the picture]:

This is less ominous than it seems – you can just click on the Update WordPress Database button and you can then log in as normal!.

We are very keen to give you a window into more aspects of our work (as you will know if you read our recent posts on open source software, load testing and our team members) so we are going to start posting our regular release notes here on the Web Services site. Release notes are not the simplest pieces of literature to work your way through so in order to help you interpret what you read let’s take a look at our latest release notes from last week on 9th May, 2019.

[Everything in square brackets are our interpretive notes!]

[First let’s take an example of a note to explain what’s what:]

Intranet – Version 1.35.00 (was 1.34.00) – [The version number tells us the latest version of the template, plus the previous version number illustrates if it is small set of improvements or a big one. So, for example, if a release went from version 2.0 to 2.5 that would be a massive set of changes; going from version 1.48 to 1.49 is a small and totally normal set of changes.]

– ### Fixed – The line with ### is not the Instagram tag; instead, it is what categorises the release item by type. Common types are ### Fixed, ### Added and ### Changed

– WSCI-461 –  This is the internal ticket number. Every bug fix and improvement we look at is recorded in a ticketing system we use called Jira, which allows us to track whether a fix, task or improvement has been completed or not. This release item was to fix a bug recorded in the 461st ticket categorised as WSCI [Web Services Carleton Intranet ] in the ticketing system. Other codes include WSCC (Web Services Carleton Content – shorthand for all the tickets referring to the CCMS); WSFW (Web Services Frame Work – tickets for the more specialised template used by a few sites on campus) and WSKS (Web Service Kitchen Sink – in other words, things that don’t fit into other categories, or which affects something in all our templates.)]

Okay, so without further ado, let’s take a look at last week’s release:

Framework — Version 1.49.00 (was 1.48.00)

### Added

– WSFW-419: David C Onley logo [A special request for an important initiative on campus]

CMS — Version 2.45.00 (was 2.44.00)

### Fixed

– WSCC-882 Newsletter Fix [This clarified the options around how many news posts you can display in a newsletter – and allows you to specify any number you want. This was requested by Mike Barker from SLaLS]

– WSCC-906 Remove sharing options from gravity flow front end pages [Improvements to an up and coming new feature]

### Changed

– WSCC-889 Increase possible posts in newsletter [Part of WSCC-882- see above]

Intranet – Version 1.35.00 (was 1.34.00)

### Added

– WSCI-410 Marketplace Updates [So Alan Kimmel can sell his knick-knacks more efficiently!]

### Fixed

– WSCI-416 Location not showing on events post type [This fixed a problem on internal sites where buildings picked from a list weren’t showing up in the footer of sites]

– WSCI-418 Typo on intranet page [Because we are never too old to have our grammar corrected!]

Kitchen Sink

–WSKS-422 Cache Keys / LINR issue [Having fixed a long-term issue Learning in Retirement had encountered due to the huge numbers of people signing up to their lecture series, we realised that the fix would benefit ALL the websites at Carleton. All pages will now load significantly faster.]

–WSKS-423 Change text colors in footer of newsletter [We changed the contrast between the text and background in order to make the footer much more accessible.]

– WSKS-430 Version lock all plugins on production composer.json [Okay –  not usre – this is getting a bit technical…]

– WSKS-438 Replace the current mu-loader with the bedrock loader [Again, I am not sure but I kind of picture Fred Flintstone operating that dinosaur crane at the quarry where he works?]

As you can see the release items range from very mundane things (like our typos) to the exciting back end improvements (making pages load much much faster!), to the very technical. If you have any questions about any of the release items in any of our releases, you can send them to web@carleton.ca.