We’re happy to announce that version 1.3 of the CUNY Academic Commons is now live!

All upgrades to the site are important, but this one brought a considerable number of new features and revisions (our highest to-date).  Here are some highlights:

New Members Directory Filters
Our biggest, and probably most noticable difference, is the new directory filter on the People page. This new feature allows you to filter members on the site by a number of different criteria. In the left hand column of the page, you can now search for colleague by college, academic interest, and/or role. This will make it easier to find collaborators in the Commons community.

Latest Version of BuddyPress Now Running
Our upgrade to the BuddyPress 1.5 isn’t so much a user-facing feature, but it represents an enormous amount of development work (thanks Boone!). BuddyPress 1.5 is more solid in a huge number of ways, and adds lots of small niceties to the interface. Most importantly, the Commons is now up to date, with the first major BuddyPress release in 1.5 years.

Autosuggest for Wiki Tags
One of the new features on the Wiki is an enhanced “Add Tag” interface that autosuggests tags based on what you enter. Start typing – you’ll see existing tags pop up. Pretty nifty, right? This is a nice way to make it easier to categorize pages, which results in a better wiki experience for everyone over time, as our folksonomy becomes a bit more regular and focused.

Additional Sorting Options on Group Forums
Individual forum topic views can now be customized a bit. Next time you go to a forum thread in one of your groups, take a look at the upper right side. You will notice that a ‘Posts Per Page’ and ‘Ascending’ dropdown have been added (see screenshot below). This allows people to view the entire thread on a single page – a big request – or to view things in reverse order – helpful for super-long threads.

Automatic Invitations to The Group for Group Admins
Anyone who becomes a group admin or mod will now automatically be invited to The Group for Group Admins.

The Group for Group Admins – A public group for all of the Commons’ group admins so that the Community Team can share information and keep you updated about changes to the site. If you are a group admin or are thinking about starting a group, please check your inbox for an email invitation!

This is just a broad overview of some of the many changes we made to the site with this upgrade, which included 30 bug fixes, 41 feature additions, and 1 support issue.  For a full range of changes made to the site, please consult the 3.1 milestone on our ticketing system.