Our development team is spending the early part of 2025 making a series of under-the-hood improvements to our two-factor authentication (2FA) platform. We wanted to take the opportunity to summarize our 2FA features.
Archive | Tech News
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 […]
Full Site Editing Now Available On The Commons
cc-licensed image “Cascada de colores in La Palma” by flickr user Sevenislands Photography 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 […]
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 […]
Sutori, Padlet, and VoiceThread Embeds Now Supported on the Commons
The Commons Dev team recently implemented code changes to support Sutori, Padlet, and VoiceThread embeds on WordPress sites. Actively engaged with the pedagogical needs of the CUNY community, the Commons provides an open source infrastructure that integrates both proprietary and non-proprietary resources. Here is a list of custom file and content types which can be […]
Gutenberg – The New WordPress Editor
Block Editing WordPress 5.0 was released in early December and features a modern, new editor called “Gutenberg” that replaces the “Classic” editor that has been around for years. Gutenberg is one of the biggest and most controversial changes in WordPress history, and the web is filled with articles, both pro and con. Gutenberg’s user experience […]
Teaching on The Commons: Inviting Students To Your Course
The Commons Team is constantly striving to make The CUNY Academic Commons a more robust platform for teaching. In the spring we released our new invitation system that makes it much easier to bring an entire class onto a to your course site. We have also published a guide, Commons Basics, for faculty new to the Commons. […]
The Commons Plugin Director
Confused about what our over 330 WordPress plugins do? Our new Commons Plugin Director can help. It provides the plugin’s name, a description of what the plugin does, the version, the author, and the plugin site URL. All these fields can be accessed using keyword searches. For example, enter “slider” if you are looking for […]
Creating Faculty Portfolio Sites on the Commons
After moving from City Tech to Hunter College last year, I was tasked with migrating the web presence I had built for myself on City Tech’s OpenLab. Unfortunately, Hunter College does not currently have a web application quite like OpenLab, which allowed for the creation of portfolios for both students and instructors. Fortunately, however, the […]
Group Forum Improvements
The backbone of the CUNY Academic commons is our Groups feature. Whether you use it as a graduate class platform, a research group, or a place to store and discuss department and committee concerns, you know how useful it can be. (And if you’re at the starting point, please read our How to Create, Join and Maintain Groups page to begin.) […]
