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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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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.)…
The Commons Releases Two New Open Source Plugins
We are excited to announce the release of two new plugins that can be used by the whole WordPress community: ScholarPress CoinS 2.0 and BP Multiple Forum Post. Built by Dan Jones, Assistant Developer, these tools are the first free-software work he has done since joining the Commons’ Development Team. Congratulations Dan! ScholarPress COinS 2.0…
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Sunset of the Wiki
Early in the life of the CUNY Academic Commons, an important space for collaborative writing and for the sharing of open content was our Wiki – powered by MediaWiki . In recent years, users have preferred newer areas of the Commons – Sites, Group Docs, Social Paper – for this kind of functionality. As a result, we have decided to remove…
HETS Commons Is Up And Running!
Hispanic Educational Technology Services (HETS) has added a social layer to its site based on the CUNY Academic Commons model. The purpose of HETS Commons is to provide a social-networking platform that seeks to establish and provide a space for collaboration and exchange of ideas, knowledge, and best practices among all HETS member institutions. HETS appreciates…
WP Tavern Recognizes Commons Registration Plugin
Sarah Gooding, writing for WP Tavern, one of the largest WordPress news blog, praised our BP Restrict Signup by Email Domain plugin: “The plugin was created by BuddyPress contributing developer Ray Hoh for the CUNY Academic Commons. It’s part of a suite of plugins recommended by the Commons In A Box (CBOX) free software project. The university…
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Tightening the Integration between Groups and the Events Calendar
We first introduced the Commons Events Calendar in May of 2015 with Commons 1.8 , and it has proved to be a powerful tool for getting the word out about upcoming conferences, seminars, and other CUNY-related events, especially for Commons groups. In our first iteration, we allowed any member of a group to enter an…
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Events Calendars: Enhanced Integration with Sites, Private Calendars
Events Calendar has gotten even better since it was launched on the Commons as part of release 1.8 in May, 2015. A great new Events Calendar feature for Commons site owners is now available with version 1.9. Events Calendars can now be embedded on sites on the Commons. To embed a group events calendar on…
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Christian Wach to Present at CiviCon
Christian Wach, a member of the Commons Development Team, will present at CiviCon on October 8th. If you happen to be in London, check him out at the CIVICON Conference, which runs the whole weekend. Christian will discuss a suite of CiviCRM plugins he has developed, in conjunction with the CUNY Academic Commons, and show…
Events Calendar: What Can You Do With It?
The marquee feature of the new release of CUNY Academic Commons is the Events Calendar. There are lots of different ways that your group might choose to use this new tool. To get you thinking, we offer here some illustrative examples of how to leverage the Events Calendar. Lectures and Meetings Many groups, such as…
Events Calendar for Groups
Our newest feature is the Events Calendar. As we told you in our previous post, you can create Events as an individual or as a group. This week we will take a closer look at creating events in a group context. Calendar Navigation Find the Events link on the navigation bar on the left…
WordCamp NYC Keynote by Commons Lead Developer Boone Gorges
To kick off WordCamp NYC this year, CUNY Academic Commons lead developer Boone Gorges gave the keynote “Free Software, Free Labor, and the Freelancer: The Economics of Contributing.” We will post a video of his presentation when it is available. In the meantime, here is a taste of what he had to say: Free software…
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