Academic Commons News

Introducing Google Analytics for Your Blog

by Brian Michael Foote on June 23, 2012 in News

Have you always wondered how many people are visiting your blog on the Commons? The Commons team is happy to announce that visitor statistics reports are now available to the CUNY Academic Commons community via Google Analytics. New features in Google Analytics have made it possible for the Commons team to provide personalized reports to members who would like to remain updated on changes in their site traffic.

How do I get started?

If you would like to receive reports please write to Community Facilitator @BrianFoote to make your request.

How often will I receive reports?

Reports can be delivered daily, weekly, or monthly. Members are able to select the day that their reports will arrive.

What sort of information is included in my report?

After indicating which blog (or blogs) you would like reports for, Google Analytics will email you a spreadsheet that will include statistics for:

Pageviews
Unique Pageviews
Average Time per Visit
Bounce Percentage
Exit Percentage

The report will include this data for the blog indicated and all of its pages and posts.

Can I stop the reports?

Absolutely. To stop receiving Google Analytics reports please contact Community Facilitator @BrianFoote to make your request.

Can I request reports for other members’ blogs?

No. In the interest of privacy we will not arrange for reports to be delivered for blogs other than a member’s own. Group blogs administered by several members of the Commons will be handled on a case by case basis and should message @BrianFoote with specifics.

We hope that offering these new tools to our community will help you better engage with your audience and give you a greater perspective of readers who visit the site. If you have any further questions on setting up your reports or have suggestions for other ways we can improve your experience please do not hesitate to contact us.

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PressCrew and Infinity Are Joining the Commons In A Box Team

by Boone Gorges on May 21, 2012 in Commons Team News, Projects

The Commons In A Box project aims to provide universities and similarly minded organizations with a powerful, professional, free, and easy-to-use platform for community engagement. A central part of any such platform is its interface. CBox is built on BuddyPress and will work with any BP-compatible WordPress theme. Thus, organizations with the right kind of know-how will be able to use WordPress’s theming system to create a CBox interface for their community that is totally unique. At the same time, we believe it’s crucial that CBox comes pre-packaged with a default theme that will serve the purposes, both functional and aesthetic, of users who don’t have in-house WordPress development talent. This means that an excellent default theme is critical to the central aims of Commons In A Box: to bring the power of BuddyPress-based communities to organizations that don’t have the resources to build from scratch.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that the Commons In A Box default theme will be designed and built by Marshall Sorenson and Bowe Frankema of PressCrew, using their Infinity Theming Engine.

Infinity is a perfect fit for Commons In A Box. In the world of WordPress Themes, compatibility with BuddyPress is often absent, or an afterthought. Infinity, in contrast, was conceived and developed with BuddyPress in mind. For newcomers to WordPress and BuddyPress, Infinity’s unique configuration file system makes setup a snap. It’s just a matter of turning on and off features to customize your BuddyPress installation how you want it. And for those who do have some WordPress theme development experience, Infinity offers unparalleled features that make advanced customization both fast and easy. The ease with which designers can realize their creations is exactly why the team chose the slogan “More Freedom to Create”.

Just as important to Commons In a Box as Infinity itself are the developers behind it. Marshall is a longtime contributor to BuddyPress and the author of the popular BuddyPress Links plugin. Bowe is the founder of BP Tricks and one of BuddyPress’s most vocal supporters. “3 years ago I was starting out with BuddyPress and I needed something exactly like this,” said Bowe. “Now I’m creating it.”

Marshall and Bowe are as passionate about the value of free software as the Commons In A Box team: Infinity, like CBox, is GPL-licensed, costs nothing to download and use, and is open to contributions from the community of users and developers. Between PressCrew and Ray, we’re pleased to say that the Commons In A Box team probably contains more BuddyPress talent than any other project.

Welcome to the team, Marshall and Bowe!

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Welcoming Ray and Dom to the dev team

by Boone Gorges on April 10, 2012 in Commons Team News

Cross-posted from the CUNY Academic Commons Dev Blog

The CUNY Academic Commons is delighted to welcome two new members to its development team: Raymond Hoh and Dominic Giglio.

Raymond Hoh is one of the most respected members of the WordPress and BuddyPress community. Known around the WordPress community as r-a-y, Ray is a frequent contributor to the BuddyPress project, the developer of a number of popular plugins for WP, BP, and bbPress, and a longtime forum moderator at buddypress.org. Ray brings to our team a depth and breadth of BuddyPress experience that is practically unparalleled. Follow @ray_i_am on Twitter or r-a-y on Github.

In truth, Ray is not exactly a new member of our team – there was a period last year when Ray did a bit of BuddyPress-related work for the Commons. As we’ve begun to ramp up work on Commons In A Box, we’ve invited Ray back on board to play a major role in turning CBox into a powerful platform. Among other responsibilities, Ray will be playing a leading role in building: a reply-by-email feature for BuddyPress; a variety of improvements to BP forums and profiles as they appear in Commons In A Box; and an overhaul to upload handling in BuddyPress that will bring together into a simple API uploads associated with groups, forums, and BuddyPress Docs.

Dominic Giglio is the most recent addition to the Commons dev team. Dom is a student in Computer Science at BMCC. He’s known in the WordPress world for a popular blog post explaining the WP initialization process, as well as for his contributions to the WordPress section of Smashing Magazine. Dom’s experience doing development along the whole LAMP stack – from WP theme building to hardware work – promises to round out our team in an invaluable way. Dom is on Twitter on @human_shell and on Github as humanshell.

For the time being, Dom will be focusing on improving the CUNY Academic Commons experience, and he’ll be picking up more responsibility on Commons In A Box as development progresses.

Welcome to the team, guys!

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Akismet Spam Protection for Any WordPress Installation on a CUNY Domain

by Matthew K. Gold on January 20, 2012 in News

Thanks to the terms of a licensing agreement generously made available by Automattic, the CUNY Academic Commons recently purchased a subscription to Akismet, the premier spam-prevention service for WordPress blogs, that can be shared with any WordPress installation on a cuny.edu domain. We would very much like to spread the word about the availability of this license, so please encourage anyone you know working with WordPress at CUNY to contact us to learn more. And many thanks, again, to Automattic for enabling us to share this service with our colleagues. Here’s to a brighter, less spammy future for all!

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The CUNY Academic Commons Will Go Dark on 1/18/12 in Protest of SOPA and PIPA

by Matthew K. Gold on January 17, 2012 in News

On Wednesday, January 18, the CUNY Academic Commons will join hundreds of sites around the web, including Wikipedia, Reddit, and Boing Boing, and around CUNY, including the Macaulay Honors College ePortfolios and OpenCUNY, in a protest of SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act, and PIPA, the Protect IP Act. As part of this protest, the Commons will “go dark” for a day to demonstrate the lasting damage that these two bills have the potential to cause the open web. During this time, visitors to the homepage of the CUNY Academic Commons will encounter a protest message that explains our opposition to these bills, along with links that will help them learn more and/or take action.

Because we know that many members of our community depend on the CUNY Academic Commons for their collaborative work, we have chosen to provide a way for our members to log in and still make use of the site on January 18th. We will also make available to individual bloggers on our site a WordPress plugin that, when activated, will make their Commons blogs go dark in solidarity with the larger protest.

We encourage the members of our community to learn more about these bills and the dangers they pose to the foundational spirit of openness that animates the CUNY Academic Commons and sites like it.

For a quick introduction to these issues, please view this short video:

We also recommend MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito’s post, “Why we need to stop SOPA and PIPA”, along with these other posts that Joi recommends:

Liz Dwyer, “Why SOPA Could Kill the Open Educational Resource Movement“, Good Magazine

Julian Sanchez, “SOPA: An Architecture for Censorship“, Cato Institute

Dan Rowinsky, “What You Need to Know about SOPA in 2012“, ReadWriteWeb

“Internet Blacklist Legislation“, Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF’s email campaign against the legislation and EFF guide to meeting with your representatives.

If you have questions or concerns about our actions, or if you would like to comment on our stance, please do so below.

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Commons Version 1.3 Has Arrived!

by Sarah Morgano on December 15, 2011 in Release Notes

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.

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Reactions to the Commons In A Box Project

by Scott Voth on December 12, 2011 in Commons Team News, News, Projects

Traffic on the Commons was up 44% throughout the week as news of the Commons In A Box project circulated through academic journals, blogs, and Twitter. Comments on our initial announcement were numerous – some congratulatory, but most written by representatives of institutions anxious to chat and gather more information.

The same day as the announcement, in the Chronicle of Higher Education “Wired Campus” blog, Jennifer Howard spread the word that the Commons had received a $107,500 Sloan Foundation grant to create what will be called the “MLA Commons.” The pilot project will create a social network for the Modern Language Association that will connect its more than 30,000 members and help promote their scholarship. Howard notes that the association had been “exploring new ways to help promote members’ activities, establishing an office of scholarly communication earlier this year.”

In Inside Higher Ed, Audrey Watters wrote about how open paradigms emphasize a community’s shared ownership of a project and “work” for academics. The Commons in a Box project “supports an open ecosystem versus a ‘walled garden’” and is part of “a larger movement on campuses to open up academic scholarship itself — not just through (open source) social networking but through open access…”

It isn’t simply that the project will put the tools to create their own academic networks into the hands of schools; it’s that the Academic Commons development team has been sharing its coding back with the open source community, with WordPress plugins for example that have been downloaded over 100,000 times.

Jason Baird Jackson, Associate Professor of Folklore and American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, blogged about the potential of partnering directly with universities in the development of tools, protocols, strategies, and projects in the scholarly communications. “For the MLA and its 30K+ members, these software tools will be the basis for MLA Commons.”

In its weekly podcast, the Center for History and New Media’s Digital Campus featured the Commons In A Box as one of three projects that are taking on corporations and developing their own educational technology. Panel members spent twenty-five minutes discussing the significance of making the Commons’ “much lauded” social network freely accessible to institutions. Built with open source software by academic technologists familiar with the pitfalls of other platforms, Commons In A Box will enable “communities of scholars” to develop. One panel member cautioned that a major stumbling block to the implementation on campuses may be IT departments, whose staff is certified in Windows and Oracle, and inclined to centralized technology. Commons In A Box de-centralizes technology and puts it into the hands of those who use it. (The audio discussion about the Commons begins around minute 22.)

On Twitter, the Commons Dev Team was universally high-fived: “a commendable work of open source and academia” (@techczech), “Major kudos” (@cogdog), “A Big Win For Open Source in Academia”(@emasters), “Major congrats on the Commons in a Box announcement! You guys do good, good work”(@nowviskie), “The CUNY academic commons in a Box idea is neat…great to see useful and used open source projects funded to scale up” (@tjowens), “Brilliant. Looking forward to this…”(@seanmcminn), “This is a fantastic effort!” @laurenfklein, Did you see CUNY developing academic commons in a box to help others deploy WP+BP… (@sboneham).

No doubt scholars will continue to weigh in on the significance of Commons In A Box, and the potential of easy-to-install, open-source social networks. We look forward to working with the Modern Language Association on this pilot project, and thank the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which has enabled the Commons to widen its mission and more broadly contribute to the academic community.

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The CUNY Academic Commons Announces The Commons in a Box Project

by Matthew K. Gold on November 22, 2011 in News, Projects

The CUNY Academic Commons is proud to announce the establishment of The Commons in a Box, a new open-source project that will help other organizations quickly and easily install and customize their own Commons platforms. With generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the CUNY Academic Commons team will launch the free software project by assembling new and existing WordPress-based community and collaboration tools into a single installation package. The Commons team is delighted that the Modern Language Association will take part in the initial phase of development by using the new platform to create an MLA Commons for its 30,000+ members.

Over the past two years, the CUNY Academic Commons has been lauded for its creation of a robust academic social network that connects faculty members, administrators, and graduate students across the diverse twenty-three colleges in the City University of New York system. Built on the popular open-source platforms WordPress, BuddyPress, and MediaWiki, the network has cultivated a strong sense of community among its members by providing public and private spaces in which they can connect to one another and share their academic and administrative work. As the project has progressed, the development team of the CUNY Academic Commons has regularly shared its own work with the wider WordPress community, releasing highly rated extensions that have been downloaded over 100,000 times.

The CUNY Academic Commons team has consulted regularly with a range of institutions both within and outside of the CUNY system that have expressed interest in creating similar sites for their own communities. The core features of Commons-style networks enjoy broad appeal as institutions look for ways to penetrate institutional silos, to mitigate the effects of geographical distance, and to produce collaborative, public-facing scholarship that can help demonstrate the value of intellectual life at a time when funding for higher education is increasingly being called into question.

In contrast to projects that seek to build online communities through the kinds of proprietary and commercial social-networking platforms that routinely mine user content for advertising and other purposes, the Commons in a Box software will provide a framework for networks that are controlled by institutions and their members, and it will foreground the principles of open access, user privacy, and non-commercial sharing of intellectual work. Educational groups, scholarly associations, and other non-profit organizations will be able to leverage the Commons in a Box to give their members a space in which to present themselves as scholars to the public, to share their work, to locate and communicate with peers, and to engage in collaborative scholarship.

Initial development on the Commons in a Box project is made possible by the generous support of a $107,500 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Josh Greenberg, Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Digital Information Technology Program, notes that “CUNY has been a leader in developing an effective, innovative social network that allows scholars to connect, collaborate, and share ideas. I’m excited to see them make this platform available to other institutions in a way that is free, easy to implement, and simple to modify. This project has the potential to bring the benefits CUNY is already experiencing to countless other communities.”

The Commons in a Box team is particularly pleased to announce its partnership with the Modern Language Association, whose MLA Commons will be the pilot installation of the Commons in a Box software. The MLA Commons team is lead by Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the MLA, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication at the MLA. Fitzpatrick says that “The MLA is deeply grateful for the generosity and the community spirit of the CUNY Academic Commons team, and we look forward to working with them in developing a vibrant platform to support member communication.”

The Commons in a Box project marks an exciting turning point for the CUNY Academic Commons as we broaden our mission and begin to serve the needs of the wider academic community. We thank the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for its generous support and we look forward to working with the Modern Language Association in the months ahead.

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André Pitanga Honored by The CUNY Graduate Center

by Matthew K. Gold on May 10, 2011 in Commons Team News

We are delighted to report that André Pitanga, IT Senior Associate (Level 2) at the CUNY Graduate Center and Systems Administrator for the CUNY Academic Commons, received an Employee Recognition Award for Outstanding Achievement today in a ceremony held at the CUNY Graduate Center.

This is very well deserved news. Most users of the Commons don’t know André, but the Commons itself might not exist without his hard work on the site, which is housed at the GC. From his careful stewardship of the project in its initial stages to the care and attention he gives our servers to his enthusiastic presence in our meetings to his intense interest in collaborating with others on the Commons Dev Team, André has shaped this project in numerous ways. More importantly, André has been an important advocate for open-source projects at the Graduate Center and at CUNY more widely, often providing advice and support to those of us working to increase the visibility of open-source projects within the system.

Last year, I wrote a post celebrating André for Sys Admin Day. This year, I’m so very happy to be able to offer him congratulations on a well-earned recognition of his achievements. Thank you for all that you do, André, and congratulations on this award!!

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Welcome to Commons 1.2

by Brian Michael Foote on May 3, 2011 in Release Notes

After months of hard work the CUNY Academic Commons team is happy to release the CUNY Academic Commons Version 1.2.0. This latest upgrade has some of our most ambitious new features to date with many developed in response to the community’s insight and suggestions. This post will introduce you to Commons 1.2.0, walk you through some of the changes to the Commons, and help you get acquainted with your new features.

The biggest new feature of 1.2.0 is BuddyPress Docs. Developed by the Commons’ own Boone Gorges, BuddyPress Docs is a powerful new tool for the Commons and BuddyPress community that allows groups to collaboratively write and edit documents. BuddyPress Docs is a simple way for groups to work together on creating documents and store them on the Commons. The collaborative documents can be tagged, commented on, and and searched through by keywords. The Development team has also built in steps for overwrite protection to avoid losing data that you do not wish to have altered. Because only one person can edit a BuddyPress Doc at a time, an automatic timer logs out inactive editors to prevent inaccessibility. We are especially proud to bring this feature to you as it has been our most requested development project by the community. You may have already discovered that this new feature is highlighted by a yellow tag describing the changes made and indicating where to go to explore these changes. This notice will remain until you dismiss it by selecting ‘Dismiss this notice.’ More information about the feature and testing feedback can be found here.

Bringing BuddyPress Docs to the Commons has necessitated changes to how we previously referred to some group features. What were previously called ‘Documents’ are now referred to as ‘Files.’ The change to the sidebar is pictured below:

We have also strengthened the features available in the ‘Group Blog’ function. Going forward you can now uncouple your group blog from your group should you decide to take your blog in a different direction. This option is found under the admin tools of the group in ‘Group Blog.’ Other updates to the group blog feature include better integrated privacy settings and information about your group’s connections will now be displayed on the group blog’s dashboard. We have also streamlined the process for changing your group’s URL/slug should you wish to do so.

The member directory, found by selecting the ‘People‘ tab, has been improved as well. The directory now lists each member’s school affiliation, title, and interests. This change makes locating colleagues by school and interests easier than ever.

These are just a few of the many changes you’ll find in Version 1.2.0. Commons 1.2.0 also includes many bug-fixes and minor feature updates that we expect will make your time on the Commons easier and more productive. In the coming weeks the Community Team will be uploading instructional videos to walk you through some of our latest features as well updated blog posts highlighting other changes to the Commons. We encourage your feedback and hope you enjoy these additions to the Commons. Should you experience any problem with the Commons through the upgrade be sure and reach out to us by either selecting the ‘feedback’ tab on the right hand side of the page or emailing us at commons@gc.cuny.edu.

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