February 20, 2025

Overview

This document may change as the release approaches.

This release brings our customers quite a few new and upgraded features, including the availability of one of the Theme Contest winners!

As always, we have plenty of bug fixes to address the issues you may or may not have encountered in the New DesignPLUS Sidebar.

Theme Contest: New Theme!

The Headroom theme was contributed by Joshua Pope (BYU), one of the winners of the DesignPLUS Theme Design contest! There is now a new single class theme called dp-headroom with variations for different institutional colors. The new theme can be found in the DesignPLUS Library.

Learn how to use the DesignPLUS Library tool to import this new theme.

New Resources

New Knowledge Base Articles

Our support team has developed several new knowledge base articles (KBA) to make sure all of our amazing customers have access to the newest information and answers to common questions.

KBA - Why can't I use the Custom Banner Title, Link Grid, and Headings tools on legacy themes?

New Videos

As features and updates roll out, we provide new and unique training videos for our Cidi Labs users.
This release gives you access to the following new videos:

DesignPLUS Customizations Training - In this comprehensive training video, we walk you through mastering DesignPLUS customizations for Canvas. Learn how to tailor your courses with custom themes, content blocks, snippets, and more to create a cohesive, engaging learning environment for educators and designers.

New Features

Preview Content: Dark Mode

Preview content in dark mode option selected in Preview Content tool A new feature in the Preview Content tool gives users the ability to preview dark mode in the editor and in the preview content modal. The dark mode preview allows you to see what your content will look like if a student has enabled dark mode in the Canvas app.

QuickStart Wizard

This release includes and update to the QuickStart Wizard tool that limits the number of Cidi Labs Templates and Blocks available to non-sidebar users. This update to the Content Blocks and Template Content tools in the sidebar includes an import of new Cidi Labs resources.

A new Account Setting has been added to allow admins to hide imported Cidi Labs resources (Templates and Blocks) in the Wizard. If your institution wishes to block these imports, go to the [Account Settings] page and enable the Hide Imports setting.

Admin Users can learn more about managing Account Settings and Template Pages in the Admin User Guide.

Updated or Modified Features

Customization Options

The list of customization options are now alphabetized for the following tools:

Banner Title
Content Blocks
Link Grid
Objectives
Template Content
Text (Heading Styles)
Themes

The templates and content blocks in the Wizard tool are also alphabetized now.

Flip Cards | BETA

We've made an update to allow the transformation functions for Flip Cards to fire off before any tabs or expanders are rendered, which fixes any issues with height assignments of flip cards and/or their contents within Accordions, Expanders, Tabs, and Dialog Boxes.

We've also corrected a typo in the User Guide to ensure that the links for List: Ordered and List: Unordered tools and the User Guide link in the description all function properly for the new Flip Cards tool page.

As a reminder, this tool is currently in beta, so users need to enable beta tools in User Settings to access it.

Bug Fixes

Accordions, Expanders, & Tabs

We've addressed a bug in which the DesignPLUS JS rendering certain items would remove the YouTube video start and end parameters.

Now adding a YouTube video within Accordions, Expanders, or Tabs will not remove start / end parameters.

Account Settings

The Account Settings tool no longer crashes if an undefined tool id is present in the HTML.

Content Shortcut

The Content Shortcut button is no longer hidden in the browser if the window was too small.

Course Links

The Course Links tool no longer shows hidden or unused course navigation links.

Course Upgrade Tool

We fixed an issue in the Course Upgrade tool in which selecting the Approve button before content loaded would cause an error on the item.

Now the Approve button is disabled until the content has loaded.

Customizations

An empty [Content Blocks] page (or page with blocks that all had a dp-ignore class) no longer causes the Content Block tool not to load.

Legacy

We've addressed an obscure issue in which Canvas icons in Progress Bars were being enlarged if a div.dp-wrapper element was applied to a Legacy page without upgrading it. Now icons in Progress Bars should appear normally.

Module Lists

This update allows the Module List to preserve basic text formatting (e.g., bold, italic, superscript) around Module List items if these were applied using the Canvas formatting toolbar.

🔥Hot Tip: Use the text formatting controls in the Text tool or the Style Editor to apply bold, italic, or underline formatting.

QuickStart Wizard

Content Blocks

Content Block panels no longer close after choosing a content block when the QuickStart Wizard is present.

Quick Checks

This update includes a check to see if Quick Checks have previously been transformed / built, and if so, includes a class to signify this to eliminate any errors on the proceeding runs.

Sidebar

This release fixes an issue in which the auto-launch Sidebar user setting wasn't working on the new page screen. This also reduces the time it takes for DesignPLUS to load on the +Page button of that screen.

Snippets

Firefox would remove some icons from elements when you hit delete/backspace anywhere in that element, but we've made adjustments to keep that from happening.

Upgrade Tool

Box Left Border

This update fixes an Upgrade tool bug that stripped users' manually applied bottom border style from the Banner Title prefix in the Colored Headings (Box Left) 2 theme during the upgrade. Now your manually applied bottom border will stick!

Policies

The Upgrade tool has been updated so that upgraded Policies will have the URL pointing to the new DesignPLUS primary or extended customizations course. This means that [Policies] pages from the Legacy Design Tools customizations courses should be recreated with the exact same page title in the new customizations course prior to upgrading policies. If not, an error message will appear alerting the user that the new [Policies] page does not exist yet and the sync failed.