I just released version 1.1 of the CUNY Academic Commons. 1.1 is our first big feature release since we’ve begun versioning the site, and there’s a lot of new stuff for users to check out. Stay tuned to the Commons news blog over the next few days for details about the new features. In the meantime, I hope this executive summary will tide you over:

• Upgraded to WP 3.0.2, for an improved Dashboard experience
• A new email notification system, which allows immediate or digest (daily or weekly) notifications of group activity (plugin)
• A host of new, high quality blog themes from WooThemes
• The ability for group admins to pull external RSS feeds into a group activity stream (plugin)
• The ability for group admins to change the URL slug of a group (plugin)
• Improvements in the way that the slider images on the site home page are managed, courtesy of a plugin custom developed for the Commons by Ron Rennick (plugin)
• The ability for group admins to change the URL slug of a group (plugin)
• Many UI bugs fixed

For more on what was changed in 1.1, see the 1.1 milestone.