The main purpose of the 2.4.0 release is to update the version of Drupal core used by the Platform. It also adds a couple of minor improvements along the way.

Main features:

Update of Drupal core

Drupal published a security update to Drupal's core in mid-January.  This security vulnerability doesn't affect the overwhelming majority of Platform sites, as it requires the core Comment module to be enabled, and is low risk for those that do use this module.  For good practice though, we're updating the Platform's version of Drupal core all the same.

Improvements:

Add an "automatic" Latest News block to the WYSIWYG editor

This introduces a new WYSIWYG component that is visually very similar to the "Featured Content" component commonly found on the home page of Platform sites. The difference is that this component automatically shows the latest 3 news items in the site. This can optionally be filtered by a taxonomy term, so it is possible to show the 3 latest news articles for a given topic on one page and a different set of news items on another.

Allow overriding of the "Focus State Styles" of child themes

"Focus states styles" means the styling that applies to interactive elements in a web page when they gain "focus", typically by being clicked on by a mouse or tabbed to using a keyboard.  The default focus state styling used by Platform sites is inherited from the GOV.UK Design System, and they have a helpful explanatory page on the focus state styles they use.  Not all sites we build using the Platform want to have this "bright yellow" focus state styling, so we need to provide a mechanism to override this.  This will allow us to introduce more subtle focus state styling such as that used by the BBC, which is still UK accessibility legislation compliant.