January 2019

On January 17, version 1.7.28 of the OpenLab was released. It included updates for all themes and plugins, as well as for WordPress and BuddyPress, the software that powers the OpenLab. The release also included a number of new features and plugins, as well as some bug fixes.

Block Editor / Gutenberg

Gutenberg, or the block editor, is the new editor for WordPress posts and pages, which marks a significant change from the editor we’ve been using on the OpenLab. To ease the transition, we kept the usual “classic editor” as the default, but site admins have the option to choose which editor to enable on their sites, and site members can also choose which editor to use on the level of individual posts.

Starting at the end of this summer (2019), we will enable the block editor as the default, while still allowing members to use the classic editor if they prefer.

You can learn more about the block editor on WordPress.org’s Gutenberg site, where you can also try it out, and find links to more advanced resources. If you’d prefer to watch a video, WP Tavern has posted a quick introductory video.

New Features

1. More options for member roles

One of the new features included in this release is the ability for admins to choose the default roles for members on the profile and site when they join a course, project, or club. For example, if you want members to receive email notifications and have your site included in their “My OpenLab” page, but not allow most members to post on the site, you can now set such combinations of profile and site roles when you first create the site, or edit the roles in Settings for existing groups.

2. First Year Learning Community badge

Another new addition in this release is a badge for First Year Learning Communities (FYLC), similar to the Open Education Resources (OER) badge. Courses with an FYLC badge can also be searched for in the courses directory. You can read more about FYLC badges in our help section.

3. Anthologize improvements

As part of our improvements to the Anthologize plugin, the latest update adds “author” as an option when searching for posts to add to an Anthologize project.

4. Improved formatting on Settings pages

We cleaned up a few small formatting inconsistencies in the Settings > Settings section of course, project, club, and portfolio profiles. These changes are likely not noticeable to most of our members, but nonetheless improve the appearance of these pages.

New Plugins

We added two new plugins in this release.

1. Shortcodes Ultimate provides more than 50 shortcodes that can be used in the post or page editor to add different kinds of functionality and visual elements, such as dropcaps, accordions, tabs, sliders, and more, to posts and pages. You can preview the available shortcodes on the plugin site.

2. Search and Filter allows you to add advanced options for searching and filtering posts on your site, such as the ability to allow people to filter posts by tags within particular categories, and more.

Bug Fixes

There were a number of bug fixes included in this release.

1. There was a problem with email notifications causing daily notifications to not be sent out properly in some groups with more than 300 members. This has been fixed.

2. There was another email notifications bug fixed that was preventing weekly and daily digest notifications from being sent.

3. We fixed an issue in the OpenLab Twenty Sixteen theme, that was causing the bottom horizontal borders of dropdown menus to extend a little farther to the left than they should.

4. We fixed a bug causing faculty and staff offices to appear as options along with departments, for students creating ePortfolios. The offices no longer appear.

5. There was a bug causing the required fields of “major” for students and “department/office” for faculty and staff to no longer be required when creating an account. This has been fixed.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

December 2018

Version 1.7.76 of the OpenLab was released on December 17. This release was small, but did include some important new features and a bug fix.

Features

We added the ability to disable and enable Discussion, Docs, and Files on the profile page of any Course, Project, or Club. If you don’t use any of these tools you can now disable them, and they can always be enabled again if you decide to use them. By default these tools are enabled for new Courses, Projects, and Clubs, but they can be disabled in Profile > Settings > Settings, in the Discussion, Docs, and Files Settings section.

Two additional improvements to the Anthologize plugin were also included in this release. When editing a project, you are now able to view more details about each page and post, including categories, tags, and author, as you’re choosing them to add to a project. In addition, when exporting a project to save as a pdf or other file type, the author is now generated automatically from all post and page authors included in that project.

Bug Fix

We fixed a printing-related issue causing the OpenLab footer to overlap with content on a page or post when printing from an OpenLab site.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

October & November 2018

The last two OpenLab updates were on October 15 and November 13, 2019, for versions 1.7.25 and 1.7.26 of the OpenLab. They were both fairly small releases, but each included some notable new features.

Features

The October release included an improvement for staff profiles, which has been under development for quite some time. Staff are now able to add their office or department to their profile, which can also be used as a filter to search for staff members on the OpenLab People page.

The November release included an update to the default tagline for Openlab sites, which used to be “Just another City Tech OpenLab site.” Now each tagline is specific to the type of site, such as “A City Tech OpenLab Course Site.” However, we still encourage members to create their own unique site tagline that briefly describes their site!

OpenLab members may also notice that the Users page of their site Dashboard includes a column with the Display Names of all site members. Hopefully this will make it easier to identify each member, and match usernames with Display Names and real (first and last) names. As a reminder, members may choose to remain pseudonymous, and should never be required to use their real name unless they choose to do so.

Plugins

We made a number of enhancements to the Anthologize plugin, including a number of accessibility improvements to the dashboard interface. We are also including some changes to the formatting and options available for PDF exports. These include improvements in the way image captions display, and the way text wraps around images. In addition, we added options for including the author and date for a post or page being included in a project.

We added one plugin, Easy Table of Contents, which improves upon the functionality of the Table of Contents plugin we currently have installed but is no longer being maintained by its developer. We recommend that members use Easy Table of Contents rather than Table of Contents Plus, but the latter does still work.

Bug Fixes

Both releases included a few small bug fixes. One was a bug in the Twenty Sixteen theme that caused the black border to be fixed when scrolling down a longer page. There was another bug which prevented Course, Project, or Club admins from “unbanning” a member who had previously been banned from the group. Now the interface that allows admins to unban members can once again be found in the Membership section of a group’s profile.

As always, please contact us  with any questions!

September 2018

On September 18, 2019 we released version 1.7.24 of the OpenLab. It was a small release, with two small functionality improvements, and a few small bug fixes.

In this release, the Navigation Menu widget functionally was changed slightly so menu that appears in the widget no longer includes the Group Profile and Home links by default, without a way to remove them. This should be helpful for anyone who wishes to use a menu in the sidebar for sites with more complex navigation structures.

The unsubscribe links that appear at the bottom of email notifications were changed slightly to improve consistency across different types of emails.

Some of our members may have noticed that the “Log in” and “Sign up” text was not formatted properly in the top menu on some parts of the site, but this has now been fixed.

As always, please contact us with any questions!