Monday, November 3, 2025

This past month marked the end of an era. After years of planning, migration, and transformation, our team officially closed out our Drupal 7 (SiteNow v1) responsibilities. We began envisioning our transition off Drupal 7 in late 2018, launched our first website on Drupal 8 in spring 2019. We have since moved or retired hundreds of standard and custom websites, including building a replacement digital signage service from the ground up. Repeatedly, the end-of-life date for Drupal 7 shifted and with it our priorities. We've kept Drupal 7 running and secure while providing campus time to transition. 

Last week, we removed the final Drupal 7 websites from our hosting subscription and requested the associated servers be spun down. Support for the legacy signage.uiowa.edu and signage.uihealthcare.org ended on October 31st. Today, our SiteNow v2/v3 service (now on Drupal 10) powers over 1300 websites, including the new Digital Signage service, signage.sites.uiowa.edu, which supports 130+ managing groups, 260+ signs viewed by over 360 devices. As our team turns the page, our focus shifts towards continuing to enhance Campus Signage, SiteNow and advancing accessibility compliance across our web properties.

Features

  • Banner form overhaul to provide improved usability and support new gradient functionality and responsive sizing for headlines.
  • Improved the help text for the summary field.
  • Added configurable "Related Content" headline for articles and pages.
  • Added a slide type for Mazevo events in Campus Signage.
  • Created a SiteImprove service page on ITS website and added supporting documentation.
  • Created a list of Campus Signage groups.
  • Adopted Drupal’s JavaScript messages API for displaying system messages in SiteNow.
  • Removed SiteNow v1 documentation from the ITS website.
  • Improved text formatting for Campus Events displayed in SiteNow websites.
  • Content filtering improvements for Campus Signage.
  • Added login link to group pages on Campus Signage.
  • Print style improvements for left- and right-aligned images.

Fixes

  • Siteimprove issue for Stat block and table captions with "Text in all caps".
  • Fix for scrollbars on Campus Signage displays.
  • Fix for slide progression on Campus Signage displays.
  • Fixes for Siteimprove issues: main navigation's “Container element is empty” and “Role not inside the required context"
  • Search index fixes for SiteNow behind authentication websites.
  • Configuration fix for websites using Piwik Pro analytics.

Notable Site Launches