We are pleased to announce CUNY Academic Commons, version 1.5! While this is our first major release in more than a year, to say that the Commons 1.5 milestone has been over four years in the making is certainly not an understatement*.

Though the 1.5 release includes over twenty new features, below are some highlights.

Profiles

The marquee feature of the 1.5 release provides a totally revamped profile experience, featuring a brand new visual design and advanced customization. Members can now configure their profiles to reflect their accomplishments, current projects, interests, positions, publications, and various rss feeds. This new interface provides many ways to build your profile/portfolio.

Custom Profile Quicklinks

There are many services that will shorten a URL, but with our new “quick link” profile field, you can now generate a custom “http://cuny.is/” URL that will take users to your profile on the Commons. This new feature allows members to create a primary, beautiful, easy-to-find space for their academic identity. While we purchased the “cuny.is” Icelandic domain name over a year ago, we’ve limited its use to URLs attached to our Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ social media posts. To go along with our profile overhaul, we’re extremely proud to unveil custom profile quick links to the Commons community, which can be used in such places as websites, social media accounts, signature lines, business cards, and resumes.

Group Files

There are also major updates to the Group Files interface,  including warnings before files are deleted and the ability to add files without sending out notifications to group members. These improvements should be especially helpful for members who want to upload several files at once without overloading everyone’s inbox.

Twitter Page

Since many of our members are on Twitter,  we’ve created a new Twitter page where users can explore tweets by and about the CUNY community.

The software which makes the Twitter page possible was developed by the CUNY Academic Commons. In keeping with our philosophy of sharing software, anyone can download the source code on GitHub and modify it according to their particular needs.

This is just a broad overview of some of the many changes we made to the site with our most recent release, which includes 4 bug fixes, 23 new features, and 1 support issue.  For a full range of updates, please consult the 1.5 milestone. We hope you enjoy these additions and encourage your suggestions for future feature requests. 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.

*To help manage bugs and feature requests we use Redmine, an open-access project management solution used at several CUNY campuses. One of the tickets in our 1.5 release, #85 , was created over 4 years ago by Project Director Matthew Gold. We are currently up to ticket #2783. To learn more about our ticketing system, read this overview of Redmine.