Author: Boone Gorges

Commons 1.4

I’ve just released version 1.4 of the CUNY Academic Commons. 1.4 is a major feature release for the Commons. Some feature highlights:

  • Reply to BuddyPress content (forums, private messages, public activity mentions) by responding to email notifications. This plugin, BP Reply By Email, was developed specifically for use here on the Commons, by our own Raymond Hoh.
  • Users can now specify that specific profile field should be visible to Friends, Logged-In Users, or Anyone
  • Upgraded to the latest version of BuddyPress, version 1.6
  • New WordPress plugin for embedding Google Docs, developed (again!) by our own Raymond Hoh
  • Users can now select affiliation with more than one college
  • The WP plugin Anthologize is now available for Commons blogs
  • Users can now clear recent status updates from their profile headers

Special thanks to all members of the Commons Development and Community teams who helped to make this release possible.

For complete details on the release, visit the 1.4 milestone.

Commons 1.3.16

I’ve just released version 1.3.16 of the CUNY Academic Commons. 1.3.16 is a maintenance release, including the following:

  • Upgrade from WordPress 3.4 to 3.4.1
  • A fix (the final fix, I’m hopeful) for ongoing problems in the way the groupblog membership syncing works
  • Some rewriting of the way group digest emails are sent
  • New WP plugin: User Role Editor

For full details on the release, check out the 1.3.16 milestone.

Commons 1.3.15

I’ve just released version 1.3.15 of the CUNY Academic Commons. 1.3.15 is an important bugfix release, including the following fixes:

  • Upgraded WordPress to version 3.4
  • New WP plugin: Advanced Excerpt
  • Improved email notification formatting
  • Bugfixes on group activity subscription digests

For complete details on the release, visit the 1.3.15 milestone.

Commons 1.3.13

I’ve just released version 1.3.13 of the CUNY Academic Commons. 1.3.13 is a significant bugfix release, including the following fixes:

  • Upgraded to most recent WP security release
  • Memory issues involving large WP menus have been addressed
  • New WP plugins: WP Publication Repository, VéritéCo Timeline, jQuery Lightbox, TheThe Tabs and Accordions
  • Updates to WooThemes themes
  • Added cuny.tv email addresses to registration whitelist

See the 1.3.13 milestone for complete details on this release.

Welcoming Ray and Dom to the dev team

The CUNY Academic Commons is delighted to welcome two new members to its development team: Raymond Hoh and Dominic Giglio.

Raymond Hoh is one of the most respected members of the WordPress and BuddyPress community. Known around the WordPress community as r-a-y, Ray is a frequent contributor to the BuddyPress project, the developer of a number of popular plugins for WP, BP, and bbPress, and a longtime forum moderator at buddypress.org. Ray brings to our team a depth and breadth of BuddyPress experience that is practically unparalleled. Follow @ray_i_am on Twitter or r-a-y on Github.

In truth, Ray is not exactly a new member of our team – there was a period last year when Ray did a bit of BuddyPress-related work for the Commons. As we’ve begun to ramp up work on Commons In A Box, we’ve invited Ray back on board to play a major role in turning CBox into a powerful platform. Among other responsibilities, Ray will be playing a leading role in building: a reply-by-email feature for BuddyPress; a variety of improvements to BP forums and profiles as they appear in Commons In A Box; and an overhaul to upload handling in BuddyPress that will bring together into a simple API uploads associated with groups, forums, and BuddyPress Docs.

Dominic Giglio is the most recent addition to the Commons dev team. Dom is a student in Computer Science at BMCC. He’s known in the WordPress world for a popular blog post explaining the WP initialization process, as well as for his contributions to the WordPress section of Smashing Magazine. Dom’s experience doing development along the whole LAMP stack – from WP theme building to hardware work – promises to round out our team in an invaluable way. Dom is on Twitter on @human_shell and on Github as humanshell.

For the time being, Dom will be focusing on improving the CUNY Academic Commons experience, and he’ll be picking up more responsibility on Commons In A Box as development progresses.

Welcome to the team, guys!