New Release Schedule and Procedures document available

Starting today, the Commons dev team is rolling out a new procedure to warn Commons members of certain sorts of WordPress plugin updates on the site. This policy is part of a response to some recent problems where one of our partner developers – members of the Commons who use our platform as a host for their organization’s website – found his site broken by a major (and buggy) upgrade to one of the plugins underpinning his site’s functionality. In response, we’ll now be announcing on the 5th of each month which Commons software (WordPress and BuddyPress, along with other plugins and themes) will be receiving major updates on the 21st of that month. For more details on this new policy, along with some other high-level discussion of the schedule and procedures we follow for releases here on the Commons, visit our new Release Schedule and Procedures page.

Commons 1.5.1

I’ve just released version 1.5.1 of the CUNY Academic Commons. This maintenance release fixes a number of issues, including:

  • Styling improvements for new Profiles
  • Fixed some legacy group email subscription statuses
  • Allowed profile fields to render certain HTML
  • Fixed bug that caused Positions widget to fail when fields contained ampersands

For a complete description, visit the 1.5.1 milestone.

Commons 1.5

I’ve just released version 1.5 of the CUNY Academic Commons. This is a major feature release for the Commons. Major improvements:

  • A sophisticated new system for user profiles. You’ll be hearing more about this feature as we announce a couple of new initiatives over the next few weeks.
  • A new Commons Twitter page commons.gc.cuny.edu/twitter, where users can explore tweets by and about the CUNY community.
  • Improvements to the appearance of the footer and admin bar that appear across the Commons.
  • Improvements to the Group Files interface, including warnings before deliting files and the ability to add files without sending out notifications to group members.
  • Better emails for users joining the Commons for the first time.

In addition, we have installed a number of new plugins and made some smaller fixes. For complete details on the release, visit the 1.5 milestone.

Commons 1.4.32

I’ve just released version 1.4.32 of the CUNY Academic Commons. This is a maintenance release with a number of fixes:

  • Removes the deprecated Apture WP plugin
  • Updates to some custom themes
  • Fixes bug in external blog post plugin that caused items to be bumped to the top of the activity stream

For more information on the release, visit the 1.4.32 milestone.

A reminder that we are currently on our summer release schedule. Our next scheduled maintenance release is on September 1, when we will resume thrice-monthly versions.

Commons 1.4.31.1

I’ve just released version 1.4.31.1 of the CUNY Academic Commons. This is an emergency bugfix release.

Part of the 1.4.31 release last week was the upgrade of the WP plugin The Events Calendar from v2.0.11 to a completely rewritten v3.0. However, that updated version contained multiple bugs that completely broke important functionality on several sites hosted on the Commons. Commons 1.4.31.1 rolls the plugin back to the last known-working version for the time being.

For complete details, see the 1.4.31.1 milestone.

Commons 1.4.31

I’ve just released version 1.4.31 of the CUNY Academic Commons. 1.4.31 is the second of our monthly releases during the summer of 2013, and includes a number of fixes and small features. Highlights:

  • Security updates to WordPress and BuddyPress
  • Elegant Themes updated
  • A number of new plugins: Page Excerpt, Easy Rotator, Column Shortcodes, Next Page Buttons, Page Links Plus: Single Page, WP Post to PDF
  • New WP themes: Aggregate, Lucid
  • Fixed a bug that prevented recent groupblog posts from appearing on front page of the site
  • Improvements to reply by email functionality

For complete details, see the 1.4.31 milestone.

A reminder that, due to the summer schedule, the next maintenance release (1.4.32) is scheduled for August 11.