Commons 2.1: Activity and Events at a Glance
We’re excited to begin a new year and a new semester with a cleaner main menu and several important new ways to jump into everything happening on the Commons. Last spring, we brought the key elements of our homepage redesign to our top-level People, Groups, Sites, and Courses directories. We’re now launching overhauled Events, Activity…
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New WordPress Themes Now Available
This month we deprecated a number of older, rarely-used themes and added seven modern and exciting ones. The Commons tries to limit WordPress theme choices to around 50 themes so that our Dev team can more easily manage their updates and monitor any vulnerabilities. If you have a particular theme you want, we can install…
Commons 2.0: A New Era for the CUNY Academic Commons
As spring exams give way to summer, we’re pleased to announce the release of Commons 2.0! Since January, Commons members and visitors have been enjoying our homepage redesign – a long overdue rethinking of the look, feel, and functionality of the Commons homepage. As we move into the Commons 2.0, we have extended these new…
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Full Site Editing Now Available On The Commons
Full Site Editing (“FSE”) lets you change every part of a WordPress post, page, or template, using the Block Editor. With a FSE-enabled theme such as Twenty Twenty-Two, you can build a page from scratch or edit the theme’s underlying templates so that every page or post using this template takes on that new design.…
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New Year, New Commons!
Welcome to the 1.19 Release As the CUNY Academic Commons enters its 13th year, we’re thrilled to unveil a cornerstone for the years to come – a new homepage with a visual and functional overhaul that will eventually transform the entire platform. A quick visit to commons.cuny.gc.edu should give you an idea of what’s now…
New Features: OER Metadata and Editing Instructors
In addition to our homepage overhaul, today we’re also launching a few targeted improvements in how we catalog and display the fast-expanding number of courses on the Commons. As we increasingly open up education on the Commons, it is now possible to mark your Group and/or Site, including a course group or site, as one…
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Introducing Block Widgets
There is a big change in the way widgets are handled with the release of WordPress 5.8. Previously, Commons members added widgets to “widget areas” (sidebars, footers, etc.) by going to Appearance>>Widgets or to Customize>>Widgets. There they found an array of widgets, some provided by WordPress, some provided by the theme, and some provided by…
CUNY Academic Commons Annual Report 2019-2020
The Commons Annual Report for 2019-2020 is now available to download! Released roughly six months later than usual due to the disruption of the pandemic, the report highlights the importance of the Commons to so many who are adapting to the world of remote teaching and learning. We have added 4,600 members since June (a…
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New Release: Conference Template and OER Showcase
The CUNY Academic Commons team is pleased to announce a series of updates focused on the use of the platform for open educational resources (OER) and academic conferences. This release is not the official software version milestone we usually hit each semester, as we’re continuing to adjust to the impact of the pandemic on our…
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Visions of Open: Digital Humanities & Archival Praxis
Commons Community, We hope you join us on Monday, April 26th from 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM for our first official installment in a series born out of our commitment to social justice and anti-racism work within our community. The Commons team is excited for this to be the first of many open virtual events…
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Commons 1.18: Group Cloning, Library Management, and Much More
Today the CUNY Academic Commons team is excited to release a new version of the platform headlined by a new group cloning feature. Building on our summer launch of site cloning, admins can now duplicate any of their spaces on the Commons. Whether you’re a faculty member repeating a course and hoping to avoid having…
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The CUNY Academic Commons, Social Justice, and the Fall 2020 Semester
Dear CUNY Academic Commons Community, The CUNY Academic Commons team welcomes you back to the Fall 2020 semester. We do so with excitement about our work at CUNY, and with concern about the multiple crises we face, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the continuing effects of systematic racism in our country and our communities. As…
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