Image Source: Andrew Gustar

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!

“April Showers”. Image Source: Robert S

We released version 1.7.20 of the OpenLab on April 18, which included a few new features and a small bug fix. We added a new theme and new plugin. The theme is called OpenLab Twenty Sixteen. It’s a child theme of Twenty Sixteen, and is quite similar, with a just few tweaks. We got rid of the black border around the site, and decreased some of the margins around the content so there’s less white space. We also increased the size of the site title, and changed some of the heading styles. We changed bulleted and numbered lists so they’re indented. Activating the theme also automatically activates the new plugin, Breadcrumb NavXT, which adds breadcrumb links to pages, making it easier to navigate sites that might have many different pages, such as Open Educational Resource (OER) sites. The plugin may be deactivated if you don’t want to use breadcrumbs, or activated on sites that aren’t using the new theme.

In addition, the mobile version of the site was improved, so that when viewing Course, Project, Club, or Portfolio Profiles, the link to the associated Site is at the top rather than bottom of the page.

We fixed a bug that affected only sites with both the Ultimate Category Excluder and Category Sticky Post plugins activated at the same time. If the Category Excluder plugin was activated and being used to exclude any categories from the home page, then sticky posts would not be “stuck” at the top of the homepage.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

We did a very small release on March 19. In version 1.7.19 of the OpenLab, we added a new Gradebook plugin we’ve been working on. It’s currently available only to our beta testers, but we hope to have it ready for the whole OpenLab community before the Fall semester!

As always, please contact us with any questions!

Image Source: Boyd

We released version 1.7.18 of the OpenLab on February 16, which included a some new features and a few small bug fixes. We added prominent links on the homepage to our three in-house sites—The Open Road, The Buzz, and Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab—so that it’s easier to stay up to date with all things OpenLab!

Also included in the release were some changes to the text in email notifications, making it more clear that members can’t reply by email to OpenLab messages from other members, discussion forum posts, or site comments. We made a few adjustments to the default settings of the WP Accessibility plugin. Most settings will not be visible for anyone not using a screen reader, but some members may notice that links don’t open in a new tab. This is a best practice for both accessibility and usability, but it can be changed in Dashboard > Settings > WP Accessibility.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

On January 22, we released version 1.7.17 of the OpenLab. It included updates for WordPress and BuddyPress, the software that powers the OpenLab, and all themes and plugins. The release also included a few bug fixes, and the introduction of three significant new features.

New Features

We’re very excited to introduce project cloning in this release, which was previously only available for courses.  Any project admin can now clone a project, which will an exact copy, keeping all content created or uploaded by the admin, while no content created by non-admins will be copied over. The project avatar, settings, and site settings will all remain the same, although admins can adjust anything as necessary.

Another major change to functionality is the loosening of the relationship between member roles on a Course, Project, or Club Profile and the Site. Previously, changing a member’s role on the Site Dashboard would always be overridden by the member role in the Profile settings. This is no longer the case. You can now change member roles by going to your Site Dashboard > Users, and change anyone’s role. This allows for usage of the wider range of roles available on the Site, such as Editor or Subscriber. Roles will only resync to match the Profile if that member is either promoted or demoted on the Profile, or if they leave the Course, Project, or Club.

As many of our members have probably noticed, we introduced HTML email. You can now read email notifications in a more attractive format. Please be aware, however, that as with previous plain text emails, you still can’t reply by email. So, as before, please log into the OpenLab to respond to messages, update Discussion Forum threads, and reply to Site comments.

We made a small change to the functionality of the “Email all members” feature, where admins can send a message to all members of a Course, Project, or Club. We improved this functionality so that instead of the sender appearing as “City Tech OpenLab,” it appears instead as the sender’s name.

New Themes and Plugins

We added two new themes – Twenty Seventeen and Gillian. These are both responsive (meaning they display well on mobile) and accessible. We also retired a number of themes that are not responsive or accessible, including Coraline, Filtered, Hero, Pilcrow, Sliding Door, Twenty Ten, Twenty Eleven, and Twenty Fourteen.  If you have any of these themes activated on an existing site, the theme will remain active.  However, they’ll no longer be listed in the themes available for activation on new sites.  Or, if you deactivate one of these themes on an existing site, you won’t be able to reactivate the theme.

We also added one new plugin, WP Accessibility. This plugin makes a number of improvements to the accessibility of all OpenLab sites. You can read more about it on our WP Accessibility page in Help, or on the WordPress.org WP Accessibility plugin page. On the OpenLab, the main function will be ensuring that everyone remembers to add alt text to images. It will also remove the target attribute from links, which makes them open in a new tab, and is not a good practice for both accessibility and usability. In addition, it will remove title attributes for images and tag clouds, which will improve accessibility for people using screen readers.

For more information about accessibility on the OpenLab, please read our Help posts on Making your Work Accessible and Summary of Accessibility on the OpenLab.

Bug Fixes

We fixed an issue with the WP Grade Comments plugin causing the show/hide link to disappear for private comments. This didn’t affect privacy — private comments have always only been visible to the site admin(s) and the student receiving the grade — but the show/hide (“spoiler”) link was missing. It now appears as it should.

There was a small bug which caused help documents to print out with some blank pages for Firefox users. This has now been fixed.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

Image Source: Denis Colette

We released version 1.7.15 of the OpenLab on November 14. This was a very small release that included a few minor plugin updates and two small bug fixes. One corrected an issue preventing members from sending invitations to people who are not already members of the OpenLab. The second fixed an issue causing the subtopics in the Help section to display in the wrong order.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

[Image Source: Jeff S.]

Image Source: Macwagen

We released version 1.7.14 of the OpenLab on September 17, which included a few new features and a few bug fixes.

We expanded the ability for members to upload CSV files, so that they can be uploaded in the Files section of a Course, Project, or Club Profile, in addition to the Site.

We also made two small changes to Course creation and cloning. (1) We changed the way that faculty members identify additional faculty who they want to list on their Course Profile. The functionality remains similar, but the Additional Faculty settings section now looks slightly different. (2) We added a few additional instructions to the first step of the Course cloning process.

We added one plugin, Accordion Shortcodes, which allows users to add sections of text or other elements to their site that can be expanded or collapsed.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

We released version 1.7.13 of the OpenLab on September 18, which included a few new features and a few bug fixes.

We made CSV files one of the allowable file types that users can upload to their sites. We also added four new plugins. Cite allows users to easily add a box at the bottom of any post or page with citation information that readers can easily copy and paste. Gravity Forms Media Library allows users to automatically import files uploaded via Gravity Forms to the Media Library on their site. Simple Pull Quote allows users to easily insert pull quotes into posts and pages. Simple Drop Cap allows users to change the first letter of a word into a drop cap.

We fixed a bug in the Tiny MCE Comment Field plugin, which was generating an error message when users commented on a site with the plugin activated. We also fixed a bug in the Hypothes.is plugin that prevented users from annotating pdfs in their browser without an additional Chrome extension.

As always, please contact us with any questions

(Image: Jon K. Bernhardsen)

Image: Sakeeb Sabakka

We released version 1.7.12 of the OpenLab on August 9. The bulk of the release included updates to WordPress and BuddyPress, the software that powers the OpenLab. These updates will largely be invisible, but there will be a few updates our members may notice.

The release included two new plugins. Admin Commenters Count should be very helpful for faculty who use the OpenLab for student work. It adds the number of comments for each member of the site to the Comments page as well as the Users page on the Dashboard. The other plugin is a survey add-on for Gravity Forms, which provides more powerful options for creating Gravity Forms surveys, such as the ability to add Likert Scale and other types of questions.

We also added a paragraph to the first step of course creation with information about the OpenLab’s Creative Commons license, which is part of an ongoing effort to clarify this for users, as well as create an ongoing conversation around fair use and citation. This is also the subject of an upcoming Open Pedagogy event on September 28.

We made a few changes to the new member sign up page, which should improve the user experience. We moved the first and last name questions to the first section, and we made it more clear that phone numbers are optional, and if included will appear on members’ public profiles. We also changed the appearance of error messages so they are more consistent with those on the rest of the site.

We added links to the three sites run by the OpenLab team to the About page—Open Pedagogy, The Open Road, and The Buzz—to make them easier to find. They’re coming soon to the homepage as well!

Finally, a small but important detail for those who use OpenLab messages: we added the ability to delete messages from members’ profile inbox.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

Image Source: Paul

We released version 1.7.11 of the OpenLab on May 16.

This was a very small release, which did nonetheless include two plugins. The PDF Embedder plugin will allow OpenLab members to embed pdfs on their sites without using a third party service and to embed PDFs on private sites. Both capabilities differ from our current document embedder, Google Docs Embedder. The Download Monitor plugin will allow users to manage downloadable files on their site, including tracking downloads.

As always, please contact us with any questions!