Reintroducing the CUNY Academic Commons Featured Content Widget

For the past two years The CUNY Academic Commons has used a plugin that allows our site administrators to feature specific content from across our community on our home page. This plugin was originally written by Michael McManus of Cast Iron Coding, and served its purpose perfectly. However, as it is with all software projects, updates to the WordPress core in general and to our site specifically, began to wear on the plugin’s internal structure and features. My first assignment upon joining the Commons development team was to bring this plugin back into conformance with WordPress best practices and coding standards, and to add some long awaited features that our admins had been patiently waiting for.

I am happy to announce today that the first version of this rewrite (v1.0.0) is available in the WordPress plugin repository, and I’d like to introduce you to some of the new features and functionality.

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Commons 1.4.3

I’ve just released version 1.4.3 of the CUNY Academic Commons. Commons 1.4.3 is a bugfix release with a number of important fixes:

  • Provides a fallback for failures in the Reply By Email pseudo-daemon, to prevent lag time in posting responses
  • Fixes a bug in the email invitation system that prevented some users from sending invitations
  • Fixes compatibility issue between non-CUNY signup code AJAX and BP 1.6
  • Fixes bug that prevented users from changing their email addresses in certain circumstances
  • Improves cookie handling during login for fewer redirects

For complete details on the release, visit the 1.4.3 milestone.

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.