A Mercury Reader in Every Pot

Last week the web team embarked on a (relatively) major upgrade to Mercury Reader. It's the first time in many years that we've been able to focus so much brain power on one piece of software and we were able to knock thirteen bug reports off our list as a result, reducing the issue queue by 50%. The list of improvements is as follows:

  • Added an update hook to slough off anomalous duplicate taxonomy terms.
  • Fixed issue in which Drupal sites reports field_XX exists but is missing a corresponding field definition.
  • Fixed associated group field in Mercury Reader settings.
  • Deleted unused css that could conflict with custom themes.
  • Fixed some minor display issues.
  • Future-proofed against PHP 8.2.
  • Fixed news media captions.

It should be noted that if you have nodes that were mangled by the taxonomy bug, there's a possibility that this release could get rid of all the taxonomy terms on many nodes. This is not ideal but there turned out to be no simple way to determine which of any given set of duplicate terms which was the "real" one. We chose to keep the term with the lowest ID, reasoning that the oldest one is the authoritative one, but we've already seen several nodes that don't conain this "ur-term." Reasoning that it would be better to have no terms than terms linking to a big fat error page, we chose to delete them anyway. 

You can fix affected nodes by reimporting them. 

This release takes care of a lot of longstanding and unpleasant bugs, and while we didn't knock out everything on this go-around, we did knock out a lot. The team put in a lot of effort and the software is much improved, so enjoy. To install it, just run composer update. 

Category