On March 19, we release version 1.7.30 of the OpenLab. It included a number of new features as well as few minor plugin updates and some bug fixes.

New Features

On the OpenLab Courses directory page, we added “Cloneable” as an option under the “Type” dropdown, so you can now search for courses that allow other OpenLab faculty to clone them.

In another cloning-related update, we made a change to the widget on sites with shared cloning enabled. Anyone who is not faculty, or faculty who are not logged in will now see the text, “Logged-in faculty members can clone this course.” Faculty who are logged in will continue to see a link to “Clone this Course.”

We also added a checkbox allowing site admins to control on a more fine-grained level what actions will send email notifications for Discussion, Docs, Files, and Calendar.  Now, any time you add new or edit existing content, you can choose whether or not you want to send an email notification to all members of your group.

 

WP Broken Link Status Checker is a new plugin that allows you to run scans on your site to check for any links that no longer work.  This could be helpful especially for evergreen sites that include links to many external resources, such as OERs.

Bug Fixes

We fixed five bugs in this release.  One caused “Library” to stop appearing as a department choice under the School of Arts and Sciences, meaning there was no way to categorize Library courses.  Now, all projects, clubs, portfolios, and people can choose Library as an option under Arts and Sciences and/or Academic Affairs, and courses can choose Library under Arts and Sciences.  If you teach a Library course this semester, and weren’t able to properly categorize it, you can correct this by going into Profile > Settings, and then choose School: Arts and Sciences > Department: Library.

Another bug was causing the time reported for activity of different kinds in a group (e.g. blog post, comment, discussion post, new doc, etc) as five hours ahead of the correct time in daily and weekly digest email notifications.

There were two bugs fixed in the OpenLab Gradebook plugin.  One caused an issue for people who had cloned a course with Gradebook active on the source course.   The plugin on the new course didn’t allow them to save new gradebooks or add students to a new gradebook.  This issue is fixed for all newly cloned sites, but if you cloned a site prior to March 19 and are experiencing this issue, you can fix it by deactivating the Gradebook plugin and reactivating it.  The second issue was a conflict with the “Page Links To” plugin, which has been fixed.

We also fixed an accessibility issue with the Hemingway theme by adding labels for screen readers for two buttons that were missing the labels that identify the element as a button so users with screen readers are aware of its function.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

February 2019

On February 19, version 1.7.29 of the OpenLab was released. It included a few minor updates for plugins and, as well as a number of new features and some bug fixes.

New Features and Updates

We added a Pronouns field to member profiles, so OpenLab members can now include their preferred pronouns (e.g. she/her/hers) on their profile page.

We also made a change to Portfolio functionality, allowing Discussion, Docs, and Files to be activated on Portfolio Profiles.  To activate any of these tools, navigate to your Portfolio Profile > Settings (in the right-hand menu) > Settings (in the sub-menu at the top of the Settings page).  You can click the checkboxes for any of these tools you would like to activate.

OpenLab members may notice a new theme and new plugin available for activation on OpenLab sites.  The theme is called OpenLab Twenty Thirteen, which is a child theme of Twenty Thirteen.  For now the only difference between the two is that activating the theme also automatically activates the plugin, Breadcrumb NavXT, which adds breadcrumb links to pages, making it easier to navigate sites that might have a large number of pages. The plugin may be deactivated if you don’t want to use breadcrumbs, but it is only compatible with the OpenLab Twenty Thirteen and OpenLab Twenty Sixteen themes.

The plugin is Mammoth .docx converter, which allows you to more easily copy and paste from Microsoft Word without losing formatting.  Something to keep in mind with this plugin is that the more semantic your Word docs are (e.g. use of Heading and paragraph styles), the better the formatting will translate in your posts and pages.

Finally, we made a few accessibility improvements to the settings page for the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin.  These were incorporated by the plugin developer, so they are included for anyone who uses the latest version of the plugin in the broader WordPress community.

Bug Fixes

We fixed three bugs in this release.  One was preventing admins from sending messages to all members of a course, project, or club.  Another was causing the accessibility link in the footer to break, and a third fixed a problem where department and major were no longer required fields when editing a member profile.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

 

 

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!

On August 15, version 1.7.23 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 few new features and plugins.

New Features

1. One of the new features included in this release is a change to course cloning functionality, called “shared cloning.” This feature can be enabled to allow other faculty to clone a course that is designated as available for shared cloning. This functionality will likely be especially useful for sites like Open Educational Resources (OER) and course coordination sites, but, it can be activated on any course site.

Once enabled, other faculty will be able to clone the course, creating an exact copy of the existing course, including all content created or uploaded by the course admin, which can be reused, remixed, transformed in the new version. Cloned versions of the course will include a list of credits on the course profile and in the site sidebar with attribution to any of the original courses. If the original course was itself a clone of another faculty member’s course, that course, as well as all previous iterations, would be included in the credits list as well.

You can find instructions on shared cloning in our help section.

2. Another new feature is the addition of an OER badge, which appears on the avatar of a course or project designated as an OER. Courses and projects with an OER badge can also be searched for in course and project directories. You can read more about OER badges in our help section.

3. OpenLab members can now use “@” mentions in a few places around the site. In the four places listed below, when you type the “@” symbol and then begin typing another member’s display name or username, suggestions will appear after a moment:

1. When writing a private message
2. When writing a discussion topic or reply in a course, project, or club.
3. When writing a post on a site Dashboard
4. When writing a comment on a site

After published, the @-mention will link to the member’s profile, and in all cases except a private message, the person mentioned will receive an email notification.

New Plugins

We added two new plugins in this release:

1. Embed Comment Images, provides an easy way to include images in comments.

2. TablePress provides a very robust but simple way to add tables to any post or page. It is mobile-friendly and allows anything from simple to more complex tables that can be sorted or filtered, or split into multiple pages.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

On May 17, we released version 1.7.21 of the OpenLab. This was a small release, but it included a few new plugins. One is the premium version of the PDF Embedder plugin, which adds functionality that should be useful to many OpenLab members, including a download button for embedded PDFs, the ability to show active links in PDFs, and a better views on mobile. If you’re already using PDF Embedder, you can continue to use it, but in order to take advantage of the new features, you’ll need to deactivate it, and activate the premium version. It appears in the list of plugins on your site dashboard just below PDF Embedder, and is called PDF Embedder Premium. We also added a plugin called Easy Custom Sidebars, which allows you to show a different sidebars, on different pages of your site. This plugin replaces Dynamic Widgets, which had a similar functionality, but was more difficult to set up.

As always, please contact us with any questions!