I’ve just released version 1.3 of the CUNY Academic Commons. 1.3 is a major feature release for the Commons. Various technical and extra-technical hurdles have held up v1.3 for a bit longer than the team may have liked, so it feels particularly good to announce its release.

You can read a nice round-up of highlights at our News blog. Here is a quick list, from the development point of view:

• Upgraded to latest BuddyPress, including all BP-dependent plugins (among others, a large rewrite of much of BuddyPress Groupblog)
• New directory filters for Members
• Autosuggest for wiki tags
• Icon display of social media fields on user profiles
• Sorting/posts-per-page dropdowns for individual forum topics
• Auto-invitations to the Group for Group Admins for group admins/mods
• Infrastructure for the invitation of non-CUNY site members, via admin-supplied signup code
• Save rich text editor preferences in MediaWiki
• Non-network-activate Viper’s Video Tags WP plugin
• Better handling of LaTeX in group email notifications
• Prompt for forcing the filling in of “Role” on user profiles
• IE styling fixes for BP theme
• Improvements to groupblog activation during group creation
• Better custom image support for Featured Content Widget plugin
• Dashboard Widget cruft removed
• Autocomplete for adding users to blogs
• New WP plugin: FD Footnotes

Keep an eye on the Codex in the upcoming days for posts highlighting some of these features.

For complete details on the 1.3 release, see the milestone.