We’re delighted to announce the latest release of the CUNY Academic Commons, version 1.4. The development team has been working feverishly over the past few months, addressing important issues such as profile privacy and group communication in response to feedback and insight from our community. Though the 1.4 milestone includes many new features and bug-fixes, below are some highlights.

Reply By Email
Participate in discussions on the Commons without leaving your inbox. When you receive a notification of a forum post, a private message, or a public @-mention, reply to the notification email, and your reply will be posted to the Commons web site. For more information about this feature, click here.

Improved email notification subjects
For those who live in their inbox, we’ve made Commons email notifications a bit more friendly by reorganizing their subject lines. We’ve shortened subjects, and put the most important information up front, so that you can more quickly get a sense of recent activity by glancing at your inbox.

Google Docs for your blog
The Google Docs Shortcode plugin, built by the Commons, allows for easy embedding of any type of Google Doc into a Commons blog page. To learn more about this plugin and how to use it on the Commons, click here.

Profile privacy options
You now have the option of limiting who can see various parts of your profile. You can limit individual fields on your profile to be viewable only by logged-in members of the Commons, or only by your friends. This feature is part of the new BuddyPress 1.6 release, but was originally written for use on the Commons.

Select multiple colleges
Since many members of the Commons community are affiliated with more than one CUNY campus, you can now select more than one College affiliation on your profile.

Clear old status updates
Your most recent status update appears, by default, in the header of your profile. We’ve added a button that allows you to clear the status from the header, without deleting the update itself.

To read more about the three changes related to the way your profile is presented on the Commons, click here.

Upgraded to latest BuddyPress
The latest version of BuddyPress – version 1.6 – has a ton of under-the-hood improvements. In particular, you should see a nice speed boost when viewing certain kinds of directory pages throughout the Commons.

Rewrite of Featured Content
The Featured Content plugin, which allows the Commons team to select outstanding content and feature it prominently on the home page, has been completely rewritten. This will allow greater flexibility and stability when showcasing the excellent activity from around the Commons.

We hope you enjoy these additions and encourage your feedback to help us continue to make improvements that are meaningful to the community. Should you experience any issues with the Commons as a result of the recent upgrade be sure and reach out to us by either selecting the ‘give us feedback’ tab on the right hand side of the page or emailing us at commons@gc.cuny.edu.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.