Welcome to the fall semester! The Commons team enjoyed the summer, but we’ve also been working hard to get ready for another busy school year. Here are just a few highlights!

Public Meetings

Last year, we held our first Open Community Meeting to better connect with users and plan the future of the Commons. It was such a success that we decided to schedule a public meeting to take place regularly at the end of every semester. Here are the fall 2025 and spring 2026 meeting dates, as well as the links you can use to register via Zoom:

• Friday, December 12th, 1-2pm: Register here for Zoom info. 
• Friday, May 8th, 1-2pm: Register here for Zoom info.

Our Overhauled Wikipedia Article

The Commons entry on Wikipedia is now bigger and better than ever! We are so grateful to our community team member Zach Muhlbauer for his diligent work researching, writing, and shepherding these updates.

Head on over to Wikipedia to read all about the history, people, philosophies, member contributions, and support (and more) that have defined the Commons since its founding in 2009. Even if you’re a longtime power user, you’re sure to learn something and marvel at how far we’ve come.

New WordPress Block Documentation

Our community team constantly expands the documentation available at help.commons.gc.cuny.edu. This summer, we put together a rundown of the Atomic Blocks, Kadence Blocks, and Otter Blocks libraries that you can activate on a Commons site to increase the possibilities of the core WordPress block editor. We have new documentation here as well covering the basics of the editor and common blocks.

Development Updates

Our development and design team has a few large updates in the works that we can’t wait to share with you, but in the meantime, here are some other key improvements we were excited to roll out over the past few months:

• Group management tabbed interface: We’re happy to offer so many options for customizing each Group, but we realized that the submenu interface could use a refresh (see image above). Now it’s much easier to follow the tab hierarchy when you’re fine-tuning your Group!
• Activity item deletion: If you have the proper permission level in a Site or Group, you can now delete their items from the activity stream with one click. Just look for the trash can icon in the upper-right corner of any relevant activity item.
• CV formatting and spacing updates: Our CV feature is coming up on two years in the wild, and we continue to refine it – from its custom use of the WordPress block editor to its slick public-facing design! Look for the CV link on your Commons homepage dashboard if you haven’t played around with it yet.
• Event page defaults: We’re excited to see new Events popping up as the school year picks up. But now for the slower times, there are new prompts to create your own event and get it in front of the Commons community (what are you waiting for?)!

See You on the Commons!

Hope that you all have a wonderful semester, and we can’t wait to see how you use the Commons this year. Please don’t hesitate to write our support team if you have any questions or feedback!

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