This Month on the OpenLab: April 2024 Release

Cat sitting next to new spring leaves and bright red flowers.
.

On April 16, we released version 1.7.76 of the OpenLab. It included a new feature, two new themes, a few bug fixes, and a few minor theme and plugin updates.

New feature

We’re excited to announce a new feature on the OpenLab homepage called ‘What’s Happening at City Tech’. This includes headlines and events from the City Tech News feed, adding another format for sharing information about events and showcasing the great work being done by and for the City Tech community.

In addition, if there are any active City Tech alerts, such as weather-related closures, these will appear in an ‘Alerts’ section above the news feed.

New themes

We added two new themes, Astra and Twenty Twenty-Four.  Astra offers many options for customization, but also looks good out of the box. It would work well for course, project, club, and portfolio sites.

Twenty Twenty-Four is a full site editing theme,  similar to Twenty Twenty-Two. You can find out more about both themes and full site editing in OpenLab Help. Full site editing offers a very different site editing experience than the other themes on the OpenLab, but provides more flexibility and control. Twenty Twenty-Four is designed to showcase visual and written work, and for more advanced users it would work well for a portfolio site. 

Bug fixes

There were three bug fixes included in this release. 

One was preventing the option to use an existing site from appearing during the creation of a course, project, club, or portfolio. 

There was also a bug causing issues with the display of the OpenLab footer when choosing to hide the WordPress admin bar to non-logged-in site visitors (found in the settings of a course, project, club, or portfolio profile).

Finally, we fixed an issue where the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin added a ‘Copy to a new draft’ item to the admin bar on OpenLab sites. This partially overlapped with the ‘Publish’ button and ‘Save draft’ link on posts and pages. 


As always, please contact us with any questions!


Sources

  1. Dzhumaya cat with April flowers. Bree. Licensed under CC BY-NC.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *