Retiring the Banner Card and Markdown support in Text Cards
Summary of changes
- Banner card is temporarily transitioned to Text Card, publish your layout to make migrated cards permanent.
- Text card will display Markdown as plain text instead of silently migrating to HTML.
- Changes will occur August 27th, 2024.
Removing support for these deprecated features makes it easier for us to lay the groundwork for our next generation layout system. The new layout system will feature faster page load times and, since it will be used throughout the Hub application, allow for customization of additional user interfaces beyond site and page layouts. We encourage you to stay tuned for future updates and announcements regarding these new layout options.
We encourage Hub users to publish changes to your layout containing either a Banner card or Text cards using Markdown by August 27th, 2024.
Retiring the Banner Card
The Banner card let users add a large text heading to their site/page layout which optionally could include a background image and/or search input.
The Hub team decided to deprecate the Banner card in 2020 because improvements to other cards such as the Text and Search card made it possible for users to create their own banner-like headers. Using a combination of other cards and row background images gives our users more flexibility when designing a banner to capture the attention of their visitors.
Does my site or page layout have a banner card?
While it's not possible for us to get an exhaustive list of sites and pages that have banner cards, a recent sample of over 9000 public Hub sites and only found around 1000 of these cards in production. That number has been steadily declining over time.
This is likely because you haven't been able to add a Banner card to a page or site layout for many years. So, if your site or page was created since 2020, the short answer should be "no, it does not have a banner card."
As for older sites and pages, it will depend on when it was created, from which template, and whether or not anyone manually added a Banner card to the layout.
If you tried to edit a Banner card since 2020, you would see a message that looked like this:
If you've seen that message in the past and have not replace the Banner card, then you need to take action (see below).
Temporary support in the Text card
Starting June 18th, 2024, the Hub application will automatically transform any Banner cards on your Hub sites or pages into Text cards as a temporary stop gap. This is a way of showing you how to replace the card with a Text card that you can save as is or modify as needed. For the most part everything should look the same except the search bar (if enabled) is replaced by a button that opens the search page.
Action required
If you know or are unsure if you have site or page layouts with a Banner card, then now is the time to open up your site or page in the layout editor and make sure it's ready for when we drop support later this year.
If your site or page has one of these transformed cards, and everything looks good, all you need to do is save and publish the layout. Alternatively, you can edit the automatically generated HTML as needed before saving.
You must save and publish the layout before August 27th, 2024 in order for these otherwise temporary changes to become permanent. After that date, any layouts containing Banner cards which have not been published since we rolled out the temporary changes will display a blank space (Spacer card) where the Baner card once was.
Markdown in the Text Card
The Text card originally supported entering Markdown in a plain text editor, which we would transform to HTML on the fly when rendering the layout. That was deprecated when we rolled out the rich text editor for the Text card.
Similar to what we are now doing with the Banner card, we have for many years been silently transforming old Text cards with this deprecated format (markdown) to the currently supported format (HTML).
Action required
If you have site or page layouts with a very old Text card that has not been published in the last several years, then we encourage you to save and publish the layout before August 27th, 2024 in order for these otherwise temporary changes to become permanent. After that date, Text cards will render markdown as plain text (i.e. without formatting).