The CUNY Academic Commons has been upgraded to our first named version, CUNY Academic Commons, Version 1.0!

Here are some highlights:

The Commons Wiki has been bumped up to MediaWiki version 1.15.4 – a substantial jump from 1.13.4.  The upgrade lets us install new extensions (extensions in MediaWiki are like plugins in WordPress — they extend functionality), and for this release, we’ve added two new extensions that enable the reading and writing of RSS Feeds on the Wiki.  Stay tuned for how-to documentation on Wiki Wrangler, available in a couple days.

The Wiki upgrade and the new RSS extensions let us do something we’ve needed to do for a long time – redesign the wiki home page.  Chris Stein ( @cstein ) is spearheading the effort to bring our home page alive with dynamic content such as Featured Pages, Group Wiki News, Popular pages, Recent Changes and Wiki Resources.  More about this as it takes shape!

Also in this release are a couple new enhancements for group communications.   The activity stream (“What’s new in … group?”) has branched to a new stream.  Group admins and moderators now publish communications via “Announcements,” found on the group tab.   All group member activity (including “Announcements”) will continue to be published on the “Recent Group Activity” stream.  Everyone can click on a group’s “Announcements” to read news posted by its admins and moderators, and everyone can see group activity on the “Recent Group Activity” stream.  Non-members can even reply to members’ posts.

Upgrading to Commons 1.0 was a big effort, coordinated by Boone Gorges ( @boonebgorges ), with help from Chris Stein ( @cstein ),   André Pitanga ( @apitanga ), the staff of Cast Iron Coding, Sarah Morgano ( @Sarah_Morgano ), Brian Foote ( @brianfoote ) and of course, our project director and head admin, Matt Gold ( @admin ).

Kudos to all!