2025

November

It's now possible to filter documents by the person who uploaded them to Karl.

August

Here's what's new on Karl and SF.gov this month

• In progress: primary and partner agencies on SF.gov

• News section on Agency pages

  • Agency pages now have a News component displaying the 6 most recent news stories tagged to the Agency.

  • The "See all news" button on the upper right hand corner takes users to the news list page that already exists for Agencies.

  • News pages currently display on the agencies you tag as a "Partner agency".

• Alt text is now required for images on SF.gov.

  • If your image is only decorative and does not add significant context to the page, you can use the “decorative image checkbox” to mark the image as decorative. You will not be required to enter alt text if you choose this option; however, your image must truly be decorative per federal accessibility guidelines.

• You can now filter SF.gov Meeting list views! Filter by:

  • Subcommittees and divisions of a parent agency (only if an agency has subcommittees or divisions)

  • Month

  • Year

• Accessibility updates

  • Added specification of non-default languages, so that they can be announced to screenreader users

  • Updated the colors for image with text component in campaign content type. Some darker color themes including navy blue were removed because they

• Bug fixes, including:

  • News pages without abstracts caused the entire article to show on the list view

  • Deleted date and time showed on the front end when duplicating a Meeting page

  • Meeting archive links showed {{zyx}}

  • Qless disappeared on translated pages

July

We're excited to share some recent updates to the content tiles design on SF.gov.

What this means:

• Quicklinks now feature an arrow icon to make them more noticeable.

• The remaining tiles have transitioned from a grid to a list format, changing from two columns to a single column.

• The document and data icons have been relocated to the left of the tile title, reducing white space between tiles.

What content types this impacts:

• Resource Collections

• Agency

• Campaign

• Topics

• Locations

• About

• Profiles

Why we did this:

• To help users find specific information more quickly.

• To support natural scanning behaviors.

• To organize information in small, digestible chunks on a text-heavy website.

March 20

An exciting update today:

• The “special case” heading on Transaction pages is now editable! You can enter a section title in the blank field. If the section is blank, “Special Case” will appear as the title.

February 25 Karl Bulletin

In this issue: becoming an editor; Goodbye content type labels, hello News list pages!; Meeting dates in the CMS.

January 30

For the near future, we'll be posting Karl updates in the SF.gov Teams channel. Follow along there!

January 23

Karl Day 3 progress report

I've been telling people all day how proud I am of SF.gov editors! There've been challenges this first week, but over 280 of you have started using Karl and are doing great!

Known high-priority issues and what's being done

• Agency pages are showing 7 days a week of open hours, regardless of how many days the department is open. Will be fixed Friday Jan 24.

• Draft pages are displaying on the front end in some cases. Will be fixed Friday 1/24

• NEW: Meeting dates aren't showing in the editor dashboard. Unless your meeting date is in the page title, you don't have a way to tell which meeting is which. Product team is working on a fix for this now.

• Changes are taking up to 10 minutes to show after a page is published. Turns out this is a challenge to fix and will take some time. As a short term solution, product team is working to make updates show immediately on Save in Preview, so you can at least see right away what changes look like. -Done! You can now view draft changes to pages immediately in Preview.

• Some pages are linking to Drupal nodes rather than Karl pages, resulting in broken links. The team is working on a big list of node IDs to export from Drupal and redirect in bulk. -Still in progress as of Wednesday evening, please keep sending us pages with links that don't work!

• Accordion sections are not allowing more than 3 accordions. A fix is being tested now.

• News pages aren't showing up on Agency pages, and there are no News list pages. Prioritized for work in early February.

• Blank pages have popped up from time to time. Please send us urls if you come across these--we are fixing them as we find them. We have a backup of the Drupal site and can fix for you.

Lower priority, but a fix is coming:

• Stretched images, such as those on Campaign "Top Facts." These will be fixed at some point, though we don't have a timeline right now. If you're working through a stack of pages with these images, you might decide to fix only high priority ones and let the lower priority ones wait for the DDS fix.

January 22

Thanks for keeping the reports coming, everyone! As you report issues to us, we are either:

• Fixing them ourselves, if we can

• Logging them for the DDS product team to review, if we cannot fix them

I'll keep reporting here each day on status of known issues!

Known high-priority issues and what's being done

• Agency pages are showing 7 days a week of open hours, regardless of how many days the department is open. Fix expected by end of week.

• Changes are taking up to 10 minutes to show after a page is published. Turns out this is a challenge to fix and will take some time. As a short term solution, product team is working to make updates show immediately on Save in Preview, so you can at least see right away what changes look like.

• Some pages are linking to Drupal nodes rather than Karl pages, resulting in broken links. The team is working on a big list of node IDs to export from Drupal and redirect in bulk. -Still in progress as of Wednesday evening, please keep sending us pages with links that don't work!

• Blank pages have popped up from time to time. Please send us urls if you come across these--we are fixing them as we find them. We have a backup of the Drupal site and can fix for you. -Keep 'em coming! We haven't found too many more.

• Draft pages are displaying on the front end in some cases. A fix is being tested, and if it works, should be in place by the end of the week.

• NEW: Accordion sections are not allowing more than 3 accordions. A fix is being tested now.

• NEW: News pages aren't showing up on Agency pages, and there are no News list pages. This is getting prioritized in early February.

January 21

Happy first day of Karl, everyone! Thank you all so much for your patience and good humor as we work through launch hiccups. Here's a quick end-of-day summary of bugs:

Known high-priority issues and what's being done

• Agency pages are showing 7 days a week of open hours, regardless of how many days the department is open. This is being worked on now.

• Changes are taking up to 10 minutes to show after a page is published. We're increasing resources to make this faster.

• Some pages are linking to Drupal nodes rather than Karl pages, resulting in broken links. The team is working on a big list of node IDs to export from Drupal and redirect in bulk.

• Blank pages have popped up from time to time. Please send us urls if you come across these--we are fixing them as we find them. We have a backup of the Drupal site and can fix for you.

• Draft pages are displaying on the front end in some cases. This is being worked on now.

January 3

Mayoral transition coming up

San Francisco gets a new Mayor on January 8! How can you prepare your SF.gov pages?

• You might not need to do anything. News pages have a date at the top. It will be clear that this content is of the past.

No need to edit News pages like this one, since there is a date

• If your page has policy or priorities from the previous administration, tell the public that pages are out of date.

  • Archive the page, if possible

  • Or, use the following text as an alert, spotlight or callout at the top of the page:

This content was published under a previous administration and may not represent the policy of the current administration.

• Campaign pages: Because of the way campaign pages are constructed, it is difficult to flag the mayoral transition on this content type. If you can't archive the page:

  • Use the text above in a prominent position, near the top of the page.

  • Consider removing images to add to the impact of the mayoral transition note.