Exhibit creator release notes

Purpose

Starting with the Spotlight 5.0 release, the community began creating release notes specifically for exhibit creators. This page highlights the most significant updates for those users and major platform changes. It will not include all releases and may be updated after the official release page. To see all release notes, including developer-focused details, visit the Spotlight GitHub Releases page.

Version 5.2.0

This release is the result of the Spotlight Community Sprint (Sept 15–26, 2025). Released September 30, 2025. See the full list of tickets here: Spotlight v5.2.0 on GitHub.

Exhibit Creator Experience

• Added support for creating tables of contents on exhibit pages. Headings on exhibit pages now automatically generate anchor links, making it possible to create in-page navigation or a table of contents by linking directly to sections.
• Added support for adding items via IIIF v3 manifests
• Improved guidance for reusing page titles and managing slugs
• Improved documentation for uploading multiple items via CSV
• Fixed issue where ampersands (&) in exhibit descriptions displayed incorrectly as “&”. Exhibits with ampersands in their descriptions will need to be updated and re-saved for the fix to take effect.
• Fixed a permissions issue so creators can now use the Pages widget to select pages

Accessibility Improvements

• Ensured every page has an accessible title
• Improved accessibility for carousel widgets by adding ARIA attributes (a set of accessibility specifications)
• Added automated accessibility checks for exhibit page content to help identify and prevent accessibility issues
• Improved hover shading for browse category and feature page cards

Maintenance & Sustainability

• Added support for newer versions of Blacklight and ViewComponent, improving long-term application sustainability and compatibility with future updates
• Improved automated tests and accessibility checks
• Updated documentation for code contributors and exhibit creators
• Refined underlying code to improve performance, maintainability, and sustainability
• For application administrators, improved user management dashboard to display exhibit role details, making it easier to see and manage each user’s permissions
• For multilingual exhibits, fixed issues with page translation handling
• Fixed the inability to change the facet label “Exhibit tag” at the application level

Version 5.0.0

From September 2024 to February 2025 a group of Stanford developers and a UX designer worked to significantly upgrade Spotlight, resulting in a 5.0.0 release. The results of this effort were also documented in a Spotlight Community Demo video. Improvements achieved as part of that work include:

Exhibit Creator Experience

• Added support for the controlled vocabulary list used for exhibit tags
• Fixed an issue with the exhibit CSV exporter so that custom fields data can be uploaded
• Improved the metadata configuration table by labeling the type of field
• Changed the heading icon in the block editor
• Added the ability to select a specific image area for the “Item Row”, “Item Grid”, “Item Carousel”, and “Item Slideshow” widgets
• Added support for Google Analytics 4
• Added date range controls to the analytics reporting dashboard

Accessibility Improvements

• Support for adding alt-text to embedded images to the “Uploaded Item Row”, “Item Row”, “Item Carousel”, “Item Slideshow”, and “Item Grid” widgets
• Added a new accessibility page to the dashboard displaying a report on the status of alt text completion per page in an exhibit
• Improvements to color contrast and tab order

Maintenance & Sustainability

• Improvements to the build and testing process
• Blacklight 8 support, including areas of code rewritten to use ViewComponents
• Bootstrap 5 support
• Rails 8 support
• Support for Propshaft
• Support for the modern Rails JavaScript ecosystem
• Replace functionality provided by outdated javascript libraries and ruby gems
• Improved meta tags (used for social media)
• Bug fixes and documentation improvements
• Created components to make it easier for Spotlight apps to style and customize their header and navbar.
• Fixed issues related to Blacklight Gallery, released 3 new versions