I’ve just released version 1.12.0 of the CUNY Academic Commons. Twice each year – once in the spring, and once in the fall – the Commons team prepares a “major” release, which generally includes some new features or large overhauls to existing functionality. Version 1.12.0 is our major release for Fall 2017.

Here’s a brief overview of the major improvements in 1.12:

• The registration process has seen a substantial streamlining and redesign. Notable changes include the elimination of many profile fields from the registration page #8637, the addition of an improved avatar upload form #8639, and a new “progress” UI for newly registering members #8640.
• When participating in group forums via email (“Reply by email”), it is now possible to attach files to the email. As long as these files meet our general size and filetype restrictions, they’ll be added as attachments to the forum post #8386.
• Groups on the Commons are now automatically provided with cuny.is URLs. Group administrators who would like to customize the automatically-generated URL can request a new one on the group’s Manage panel #6241.
• We’ve made some under-the-hood improvements to the way that uploaded files on non-public Commons sites are protected. First, we removed a layer of protection for public sites that have no need to hide uploaded images, etc; this change means significant performance improvements, especially on image-heavy pages like the Media Library. Second, we added additional tools that ensure that files uploaded to non-public sites cannot be accessed by guessing their non-public URLs #7997.

For complete details, visit the 1.12 milestone.

A small programming note. We generally do minor releases on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of each month. Because November 1 is only two days from now, I’ve slated 1.12.1 for November 11. This means there will be no release on November 1, unless there is some sort of urgent issue that must be fixed earlier.