Author: Scott

The OpenLab recently graduated to version 1.4!  Here’s an update on some of our new features. Let us know what you think, either in the comments or by contacting us directly.

_________________

Privacy Notification Changes

You’ll notice that we’ve made some changes to how privacy works.  Actually, privacy changes themselves are made in the exact same way, but we’ve made it much much clearer what those settings are, and what is accessible on sites you visit and/or administer.  Site and project project settings are now indicated in two ways.  First, you can see the setting in the right hand menu:

 

You’ll see that the notices are split: when the privacy settings for the Profile of your project, club, or course differ from the Site, it’ll be clearly marked. Completely open or private projects, clubs, and courses, will also be clearly marked.

Privacy is also now noted on the profile just below the avatar and description:

We hope these changes clarify the state of your project, club or course, for users and visitors.

_________________

Modifications to Portfolio Settings 

If you’ve used our portfolio system before, you’ve probably noticed that there were differences between the way those worked and our the way our courses, projects, and clubs worked.  In particular, there were differences in the privacy settings, and we’ve adjusted that:  now portfolios have the same grades of privacy as our other projects, including public, private, and hidden options.  In addition, we’ve streamlined the way to invite people to visit your portfolio:  instead of an access list, you can now invite members, or they can join or request membership just like in other projects, courses and clubs.

___________________

Changes to WordPress

WordPress updated over the break to version 3.8 (we’re already on 3.8.1, but that’s a maintenance release).  The changes are mostly cosmetic–you’ll notice that the dashboard looks significantly more “modern” and that widgets are easier to implement (you no longer have to drag them, if you don’t want).  You can learn all about it here.

_______________

New Default Theme

We’ve replaced the default OpenLab theme, going from Twenty Ten to Twenty Eleven (Twenty Ten is still there, though, if it’s your favorite!)

As WordPress tells us:

“The 2011 theme for WordPress is sophisticated, lightweight, and adaptable. Make it yours with a custom menu, header image, and background — then go further with available theme options for light or dark color scheme, custom link colors, and three layout choices. Twenty Eleven comes equipped with a Showcase page template that transforms your front page into a showcase to show off your best content, widget support galore (sidebar, three footer areas, and a Showcase page widget area), and a custom “Ephemera” widget to display your Aside, Link, Quote, or Status posts. Included are styles for print and for the admin editor, support for featured images (as custom header images on posts and pages and as large images on featured “sticky” posts), and special styles for six different post formats.”

We hope you like it!  And as always, contact us with any questions.

 

 

(image by JD Hancock via creative commons license)

Our system makes it incredibly easy to “clone” a course, bringing all documents, posts and pages created by the site administrator, and most settings to a new and uniquely named site and profile.  You’ll find cloning is now integrated into the OpenLab’s course creation.  You can view step-by-step instructions for how to clone a course in our help section.

 Cloning a course is particularly useful for a few reasons:

• for setting up multiple sections of the same course in a new semester. You can create the framework of your course, then clone it, changing the name of the url to create a new section of the course.
• for creating a new course based on an old one.  When your course is over, you can clone it, creating a new course that doesn’t contain any old student work. This both saves you time and leaves the old coursework accessible to the students who took the course. Keeping student work accessible on the OpenLab is very important: they may need to build on that work in later courses or show it to a potential employer, so please don’t delete it. (If it’s vital that your new students aren’t able to see the old students’ work, you can simply change the privacy settings on the old course to make it available to members only.)  Find more on managing your courses here, or contact us if you have questions.
• for sharing a course framework between teaching partners, or even entire departments. Some departments have expressed a desire to coordinate all sections of a course across the department.  That can also be done via course cloning: once the department has decided on a framework, it can be cloned for each new instructor, simply by changing the administrator of the course (you can find out more about there here).

If you want to copy only certain parts of a course site, however, or to copy material created by users other than yourself, you might want to use the import/export function on our sites.  You can learn more about that here.  Do note that the import/export function only copies course sites:  if most of your course material is on your profile page, you probably are better off using the clone feature.

Remember, for any cloning situation, we’re likely to have solutions. We’d love to discuss  options with you.  Email us anytime at openlab@citytech.cuny.edu.

As part of our ongoing effort to move toward more regular updates, the OpenLab recently updated to version 1.3.2.  Here’s an update on some of our new features! Let us know what you think, either in the comments or by contacting us directly.

_______________

New Feature and Widget:  Eportfolio List

We’ve added a feature that makes it possible to gather student eportfolios into a convenient list on your course profile page.  You can enable this under COURSE SETTNGS (as in the above screenshot).  Once enabled, it will gather each member’s eportfolio to populate a convenient list on the right side of your page, as here:

You can also create a similar list on the course site itself.  This does involve a separate step–you can now find a “Portfolio List” widget on the dashboard of your courses.  Here’s what it looks like:

Drag that into your preferred widget area, and you’ll see your list!

___________________

New Feature:  Filters

We’ve also added search functionality to some of our directories.  You’ll now see options (these were previously only used for courses)  for refining your search on our clubs, projects, and people directories.

____________________

New Plug-in:  TinyMCE Advanced

This plugin will let you add, remove and arrange the buttons that are shown on the Visual Editor toolbar. It includes 16 plugins for TinyMCE that are automatically enabled or disabled depending on what buttons are chosen.

Some of the features added by this plugin

• Support for creating and editing tables.
• More options when inserting lists.
• Search and Replace in the editor.
• Editing in-line css styles.
• Advanced image dialog that offer a lot of options.
• Adding and removing HTML tag attributes.

Included TinyMCE plugins: Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Advanced List, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras.

Once enabled, you can go to SETTINGS>TINYMCE Advanced to drag and drop new menu items onto your icon bar.  They’ll appear automatically the next time you make a new post!

_________________

New Plug-In:  Link Manager

As several users have noticed, the link manager was removed from WordPress dashboards with one of their recent updates.  Some users will still see it, under certain circumstances, but on new blogs you’ll have to activate the “link manager” plug-in to use the feature.  We’ve installed it with our recent update.

 

(image by mkhmarketing via Creative Commons Liscence)

WordPress is constantly updating.  Most of the time the changes are small enough to not warrant mention, or are “back end” updates that our users won’t notice.  But the most recent updates, 3.5 and 3.6, bring some changes and new features we thought we’d point out.  Hope you enjoy them!

______________________

NEW THEME:  Twenty Thirteen

We’ve added a new theme!  Twenty Thirteen.  Apart from its minimalist “flat” look (much like the newest iPhone system) and retro colors, it also has a few features that weren’t available on Twenty Twelve.

• The Home Page template has changed:  the theme is designed to be a simple blog, with no sidebar.  But if you’re attached to sidebars (and why shouldn’t you be), you should note that the “primary widget area” on this theme appears at the bottom of the page, and the “secondary widget area” is your side bar.  Drag widgets there to have them appear on the right side of your pages and posts.
• The page is now “mobile responsive” for optimal use on mobile phones.
• Post now can take various forms:  Standard, Aside, Image, Link, Quote, or Status.  You can find these just below the “publish” box on the right side of your dashboard.  And you can find more about each of these forms here.

And you can find a more detailed write-up about Twenty Thirteen here.

_______________________

CUSTOM MENUS

The format for custom menus has changed as well.  The biggest change is an accordion style left hand menu and a vertical layout, with two tabs:  one for editing the menus and one for assigning them locations.  The whole thing functions as it did before, it’s just streamlined for easier use.

______________________

MEDIA UPLOADER

The Media Uploader is drastically different since 3.5.  But it’s also drastically better, and vastly more intuitive. Users probably will have no problem making the switch (who doesn’t love clicking once where you used to have to click three times?) but a few words on the new features.

• The “Add Media” button now says “Add Media” instead of making a distinction between types of media (and, to be truthful, those distinctions didn’t matter anyway!)
• It’s far easier to deal with media now. The media gallery is accessible by a tab next to “insert media,” and clicking on an image will give you options on the right for captions, editing the image, and (very important) changing the image size.  Click “insert” into your post or page, and you’re done.
• Galleries are easier as well (and look nicer). Click “Create Gallery,” click as many images as you like, change the order (drag them around where they appear at the bottom of the gallery or on the next page), and insert them into your post.  The new galleries look much sleeker, eliminating (in most cases) the need for gallery plug-ins.

___________

OEMBEDS

WordPress has added an oEmbed functionality for SoundCloud, SlideShare and Instagram.  What this means is that you can add items from those services directly to your post by copying and pasting the URL of the file, and YOU DON’T have to use the “share” dialogue box to copy either the iFrame code (which will never work on the OpenLab without a plugin) or the WordPress code. Using oEmbed makes things very easy, but it is a change if you’re used to doing things the old way.

You can check out this list for the complete and up to date sites that WordPress has added to its oEmbed list.

__________________

NO MORE LINKS??

Oh no!  The Links Manager has disappeared from the left hand dashboard menu!  Wordpress believes that users simply don’t use it enough to make it a default part of the navigation.  True or not, we know that quite a few of you depend on that feature for managing your sites and courses.  We will have a plug-in that replaces that function soon.

We hope you like the new updates.  As always, contact us with any questions, any time!

(Thanks to searchenginejournal.com and ostraining.com for help with this post.)