Tag: widget

Reintroducing the CUNY Academic Commons Featured Content Widget

For the past two years The CUNY Academic Commons has used a plugin that allows our site administrators to feature specific content from across our community on our home page. This plugin was originally written by Michael McManus of Cast Iron Coding, and served its purpose perfectly. However, as it is with all software projects, updates to the WordPress core in general and to our site specifically, began to wear on the plugin’s internal structure and features. My first assignment upon joining the Commons development team was to bring this plugin back into conformance with WordPress best practices and coding standards, and to add some long awaited features that our admins had been patiently waiting for.

I am happy to announce today that the first version of this rewrite (v1.0.0) is available in the WordPress plugin repository, and I’d like to introduce you to some of the new features and functionality.

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New BuddyPress plugin: Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets

BuddyPress comes with several WordPress widgets, among which are the Groups and Members widgets that you see on the CUNY Academic Commons home page. This plugin makes those widgets a little more customizable, allowing users to specify which of the three tabs (Newest, Active, or Popular) they’d like to be each widget’s default view.

enhanced-bp-widget

If you’ve got a blog on the CUNY Academic Commons, you can start using this feature right away. Just look in Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets. Be sure to select the Groups/Members widgets whose descriptions say “Enhanced”.

You can download the plugin for use on your own installation of WPMU/BP here: enhanced-buddypress-widgets. It’s also available from the WordPress plugin database: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/enhanced-buddypress-widgets/.