Tag: buddypress docs

Commons 1.2.5

I’ve just released version 1.2.5 of the CUNY Academic Commons.

Commons 1.2.5 is, nominally, a bugfix release. But because of a few personal issues (two new daddies among the team members!), the release got held up in the pipeline for a lot longer than anticipated. During that time, a fair number of improvements got rolled into 1.2.5 than we’d originally planned.

Chief among these improvements is a major WordPress upgrade. We’ve gone from WP 3.1.3 to WP 3.2.1. If you have a Commons blog, you’ll notice the change right away – in WP 3.2, the Dashboard was given a bit of a facelift. WordPress 3.2 also means a beautiful new theme (Twenty Eleven), a great fullscreen writing experience in the Dashboard, and a host of other performance improvements and new features. Read more about WordPress 3.2.

A few other highlights of Commons 1.2.5:

  • New WP themes: Twenty Eleven, ThreatToCreativity, Byline, PressWork, Brunelleschi, Chunk
  • New WP plugins: Disable Trackbacks, Google Plus One, Facebook Page Photo Gallery, Spam Free WordPress, WP-SyntaxEvolved, Fancybox, Text Expander, Soundcloud Embedding
  • Some bugs fixed in BuddyPress Docs

You can read more about the release at the 1.2.5 milestone.

BuddyPress Docs 1.1: Doc History

BuddyPress Docs History
BuddyPress Docs History

I’ve just released version 1.1 of BuddyPress Docs, my collaborative editing software for BuddyPress.

The big new feature in version 1.1 is the History tab. After upgrading, you’ll notice that what used to be a single Edit button has been reorganized into three tabs: Read, Edit, and History. History allows you to brows the entire revision history of a document, to compare the differences between two revisions side by side, to view a single revision, or to restore to any point in the document’s history. Access to the History tab can be limited in the same way that access to the Edit tab can be, on a doc-by-doc basis.

This new feature will, I hope, bring some of the best qualities of wikis to BuddyPress Docs, and make Docs an even better way to collaborate.

The feature will be live on the CUNY Academic Commons in the upcoming weeks.

Download BuddyPress Docs from the wordpress.org plugin repo or follow development at Github.

Commons 1.2

I’ve just finished tagging and releasing version 1.2 of the CUNY Academic Commons. Version 1.2 is a major feature release for the site. Notable new features and improvements:

  • The addition of BuddyPress Docs, a collaborative writing and editing plugin for BuddyPress, developed specifically for the CUNY Academic Commons. BuddyPress Docs gives groups a sort of private wiki space, where they can share their writing and get work done.
  • A number of parts of the BP Groupblog interface have been improved. Group blog privacy settings have been more closely integrated; blog author/group member sync has been made more reliable; information about groupblog connections is now displayed on the blog Dashboard; blogs and groups can now be properly unlinked in order to participate in further groupblog connections.
  • The display of pending group invitations (the Send Invites tab in each group) has been made less confusing.
  • The interface through which group administrators can change the group’s slug/URL has been better integrated into the group admin screens.
  • A new Reply button on each forum makes it possible to reply to a forum post without clicking through numerous pages of replies.
  • New WordPress themes: Clean Home, Antisnews

This release cycle has been our most extensive to date, with 69 bug and enhancement tickets opened and closed against the milestone. As usual, you can read the full details of the release at the 1.2 milestone.

Sincere thanks to the Commons Dev Team and the Commons Community Team for their hard work leading up to this major release.

New BuddyPress plugin: BuddyPress Docs

When I explain the CUNY Academic Commons to someone for the first time, the words ‘connect’ and ‘collaborate’ usually loom large. We provide a number of tools to make it easier for people to find each other (that’s the connecting), and then we try to make it easy for those people to work together on projects that matter to them (that’s the collaborating). Today I am releasing the first public beta of a new BuddyPress plugin that will, I hope, be an important tool in the Commons (and BuddyPress) collaboration toolbox: BuddyPress Docs.

BuddyPress Docs adds a new tab to groups where members can collectively create and edit documents, using an easy-to-use rich text editor. Docs support tagging, hierarchy, oEmbed multimedia, and much more. I’ve written about the feature list in detail on the BuddyPress Docs homepage.

Today the project is being released in a near-stable public beta. That means a few things. First, for the moment you run the plugin on a production site at your own risk, as there are bound to be bugs and rough spots (which I hope you will report back to me!). Second, it means that it’s not up and running on the Commons quite yet. BuddyPress Docs is slated to be turned on here with the release of Commons 1.2, which should be sometime in the next few weeks. The intervening weeks should give folks in the general BuddyPress community some time to put Docs through its paces before it gets put to work here.

The official documentation states that BuddyPress Docs requires WordPress 3.1 and BuddyPress 1.3. The latter requirement is a bit of an overstatement; Docs has been tested with BuddyPress 1.2.8 and it works well. However, the former requirement is strict: though the plugin might appear to work with versions of WP prior to 3.1, certain key features will not work (in particular, taxonomies will not work correctly, so that all Docs will appear on every group, no matter which group created them). Perhaps for the 1.0 stable release I’ll forcibly prevent the plugin from being loaded on those earlier versions of WP.

You can follow the plugin’s development at http://github.com/boonebgorges/buddypress-docs.