OpenCulturas 3.0

Major update and new design

Teal and orange colored sunset with a woman standing with crossed arms in a lake, holding two burning scythes
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International — Photo: Olga Bast / OpenCulturas Next
Release notes

This major release updates the underlying Drupal to version 11. As a reward for staying up to date, you can now switch to a new base design.

New core base

There's basically no breaking change for you as a content editor or contributor. But the underlying technology has changed a bit.

  • Benefit from the latest Drupal (11) release: performance and security improvements
  • OpenCulturas 3.0 requires at least PHP 8.4. Please make sure it's running on your web server
  • All modules updated to meet the requirements (Drupal 11, PHP version)

Enhanced editor experience

The Editor now has some more autoformatting. You might have noticed that you could already write markdown style for some basic formatting like headlines or lists. New in Drupal 11: paste a link directly onto a marked text, yay!

New base theme

Read in detail about the new OpenCulturas design and how to use it in your existing (updated) setup.

Layout builder

OpenCulturas is introducing Drupal's built-in Layout builder, allowing site-builders to easily change the layout of each content type (and taxonomy type). This was a requirement for the new theme but it's also possible to switch your default displays to Layout builder without the new theme.

OpenCulturas is not yet supporting custom layouts on a per-content level. However, this feature is on the roadmap.

Please note: When you have built custom content types and you are planning to switch to the new theme, we recommend you make a plan how to adjust your given layouts. To prepare those, you can enable a full_lb display ("Full layout"). In the theme settings you can then switch between the legacy Full view mode and Full layout.

Map block with configurable zoom

OpenCulturas Map blocks have already been configurable (globally or per block) regarding the initial zoom level. What's new is that you can now configure the zoom for the “show on map” function (up to now using a maximum zoom). Please note that marker popups will only pop up when the zoom is on a single marker, not on marker clusters.

Bugfix: In case you had placed a map block with disabled results list, you might have noticed that it lost the location markers in a previos version. We have fixed this error. 

Media optimizations 

Media assets can be unpublished

Media editors now have a simple publish/unpublish toggle at hand for each media asset. We introduced this change for consistency reasons. Likewise we have streamlined all media asset edit forms. Please note that the publish toggle is not present when adding/uploading an asset to content.

Increased teaser big size

Unless you have changed the image sizes/dimensions, the Teaser big image style is now larger. This was required for the new design and might result in teaser images sizes somewhat “too large” for the legacy design. As said: if you have defined custom image sizes, everything stays the same.

Linking to dates directly

Up to now, you could only set references to event descriptions, not to certain dates. The reason is somewhat technical and has to do with repeating dates. While you can click a teaser of, say, a third entry of a repeating date and visit a full page with that very date in the title, it is not possible to makeshift single teasers that way.

Admittedly that would never have been an issue with single-date events. kulturis.online for example has lots of those.

With the new theme you can join the experiment: 

  • You can now try selecting a date node in a magazine article that reviews a certain event.
  • Bookmarks on a date node are now directly adding this date on your dashboard.
  • Or maybe you'd like to highlight certain dates on your front page, using a custom view slider. 

Note that the date in those teasers will turn gray when the event date is in the past. 

Let us know how useful you find it and share your enhancements with us!

Rather technical updates

Module changes + dependencies

  • Removed: Date Range Formatter

See the complete technical release notes on Drupal.org.