I’ve just released version 1.15.0 of the CUNY Academic Commons. Version 1.15 is one of our twice-yearly “feature releases”, which include major new functionality (in contrast with our twice-monthly “maintenance releases” that focus mainly on bugs).

The primary focus in 1.15 is on group and site creation: making the process simpler, more consistent, and better documented. Toward that end, we’ve made a couple key changes:

• All Site and Group creation happens via our new Create portal, which outlines the differences between Groups, Sites, and Group+Site combinations.
• We’ve reduced the number of steps in the group creation process by more than 50%.
• The “Add Site” tab on the Group creation process has been overhauled, for better consistency with the standalone Site creation process.
• When creating Groups and Sites, we ask for information about your project – affiliated campuses, primary purpose, etc – to help us with future features that will surface work on the Commons.

In addition to this overhaul, we’ve introduced some smaller features:

• Site owners can now add their own Google Analytics ID, to track site usage on their personal GA account.
• Remove the “last active” timestamps from the Members widget on the home page, for better readability and privacy.
• Fix a bug that allowed Papers to be created without titles.
• Added a “more actions” dropdown to group and site directories, as well as a “Leave Site” button, available for sites where you’re not the sole administrator.

For complete details on the release, visit the 1.15 milestone or read the announcement on the Commons News blog.