Release Notes

v4.5.6 - 2026-03-24

GeoDiscovery v4.5.6 is a maintenance, UX, and operations release focused on polish and hardening.

Highlights

  • Split-view search results again display sidecar thumbnails.
  • Turnstile protection was migrated to bot_challenge_page 1.x patterns while preserving facet-request and safelisted-IP exemptions.
  • Shared-record emails now include richer metadata and a permalink.
  • Accessibility coverage now includes automated axe-core system tests.
  • Static 404, 422, and 500 pages were redesigned with AGSL branding and clearer user guidance.
  • Production mailer settings are standardized around ACTION_MAILER_FROM and ACTION_MAILER_HOST.
  • Local setup guidance now explicitly includes yarn install, and bin/setup installs JavaScript dependencies automatically.

Dependency updates

  • Rails and related gems updated to 7.2.3.1
  • bot_challenge_page updated from 0.4.0 to 1.1.0
  • geoblacklight_sidecar_images updated from ~> 1.0 to ~> 1.1
  • vite_rails pinned to ~> 3.0.20
  • vite_ruby added at ~> 3.9.3

Source: GitHub release

v4.5.5 - 2026-03-05

GeoDiscovery v4.5.5 was an accessibility and dependency-maintenance release.

Highlights

  • Improved WCAG support across search and browse views.
  • Removed the Leaflet geosearch plugin that introduced unlabeled controls.
  • Improved contrast for active facets and pagination.
  • Fixed empty icon-only pagination links and improved heading structure.
  • Marked decorative thumbnails for accessible presentation.

Dependency updates

  • Rails updated to 7.2.3
  • Rack updated to 3.1.18
  • Rack::Attack updated to 6.8.0
  • Puma updated to 7.1.0
  • Haml updated to 7.0.2
  • Whenever updated to 1.1.0
  • solr_wrapper updated to 4.3.0
  • Frontend updates included vite, lodash-es, and jquery-rails

Source: GitHub release

v4.5.0 - 2025-09-26

GeoDiscovery v4.5.0 was the GeoBlacklight 4.5 upgrade release and was published as a pre-release.

Highlights

  • Adopted the BTAA-style bot challenge setup.
  • Upgraded GeoBlacklight to 4.5.

Source: GitHub release

v4.4.11 - 2025-07-11

GeoDiscovery v4.4.11 focused on stabilizing background jobs and softening the initial Turnstile rollout.

Highlights

  • Rolled Sidekiq back from ~> 8.0 to ~> 7.3 to resolve deployment issues.
  • Disabled rate-limited bot challenge settings.
  • Removed Rack::Attack initialization from the active bot-defense flow.
  • Kept IP-based and request-pattern exemptions in place for Turnstile.

Dependency updates

  • Sidekiq and logger updates
  • debug updated to 1.11.0
  • bootsnap updated to 1.18.6

Source: GitHub release

v4.4.10 - 2025-06-16

GeoDiscovery v4.4.10 introduced Turnstile bot protection with bot_challenge_page.

Highlights

  • Added bot_challenge_page and rack-attack.
  • Configured the challenge flow in ApplicationController.
  • Added an initializer for Turnstile keys, rate limiting, and exemptions.
  • Exempted facet JavaScript requests and safelisted IPs.
  • Updated deployment configuration to symlink .env.production from shared/.

Source: GitHub release

v4.4.8 - 2024-12-30

GeoDiscovery v4.4.8 combined dependency refreshes with record-display refinements.

Highlights

  • Reordered show-page fields in catalog_controller.rb.
  • Switched DESCRIPTION rendering to truncate_render_html_value.
  • Renamed the REFERENCES label from “Resource Link” to “More details at”.
  • Added conditional display logic for REFERENCES based on external_url.

Dependency updates

  • Updated gems including bigdecimal, csv, debug, erubi, importmap-rails, net-imap, nokogiri, rack-test, regexp_parser, tilt, and view_component

Source: GitHub release

v4.4.5 - 2024-09-16

GeoDiscovery v4.4.5 focused on operations and runtime modernization.

Highlights

  • Added rate limiting for exception emails.
  • Added sidekiq.yml for clearer job-processing control.
  • Switched Sidekiq logging to the Rails logger and tuned production log levels.
  • Discarded NoMethodError and DeserializationError jobs instead of retrying them.
  • Stopped tracking SQLite files in Git.

Dependency updates

  • turbo-rails updated from 2.0.5 to 2.0.6
  • sprockets-rails updated from 3.5.1 to 3.5.2
  • Rails updated from 7.0.8.4 to 7.2.1

Source: GitHub release

v4.4.3 - 2024-08-05

GeoDiscovery v4.4.3 is documented as a debugging release for the gbl1 to Aardvark script.

Source: GitHub release

v4.4.1 - 2024-06-13

GeoDiscovery v4.4.1 brought production up to GeoBlacklight 4.4.

Highlights

  • Added support for the Blacklight::Allmaps plugin.
  • Added support for Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF and PMTiles.
  • Updated homepage buttons and social media icons.
  • Reordered facets in search results.

Source: GitHub release