Commons 1.7

I’ve just released version 1.7 of the CUNY Academic Commons. This is a major feature release for the Commons. Some highlights:

  • The new My Commons feature, which is a landing page that provides an at-a-glance view of activity related to your groups, friends, and sites on the Commons. My Commons is powered by the BuddyPress activity stream, and uses a custom page template for display.
  • A related feature is the ability to follow sites. Following a site will make activity from that site show up on your My Commons page, and your followed sites appear in a list on your Commons Profile. This feature is powered by the BuddyPress Followers plugin, written my team member Ray Hoh.
  • Group forums have been migrated from our ancient bbPress 1.x installation to the bbPress 2.x. I wrote a custom plugin that handled the migration between the old forum-attachments-for-buddypress plugin and our new forum attachment software.
  • BuddyPress Docs has also been brought up to date. The BuddyPress Docs In Group plugin was written as a shim to allow us to update without radically changing our interface.
  • Group members can download zip archives of group files, either en masse or by folder. This is a custom add-on for buddypress-group-documents, written by team member Daniel Jones.

For a complete list of changes in the release, visit the 1.7 milestone.

Commons 1.5

I’ve just released version 1.5 of the CUNY Academic Commons. This is a major feature release for the Commons. Major improvements:

  • A sophisticated new system for user profiles. You’ll be hearing more about this feature as we announce a couple of new initiatives over the next few weeks.
  • A new Commons Twitter page commons.gc.cuny.edu/twitter, where users can explore tweets by and about the CUNY community.
  • Improvements to the appearance of the footer and admin bar that appear across the Commons.
  • Improvements to the Group Files interface, including warnings before deliting files and the ability to add files without sending out notifications to group members.
  • Better emails for users joining the Commons for the first time.

In addition, we have installed a number of new plugins and made some smaller fixes. For complete details on the release, visit the 1.5 milestone.