Category: OpenLab News

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. 

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As always, please contact us with any questions!

On February 13, we released version 1.7.74 of the OpenLab. It included a new theme, a few minor plugin and theme updates, and a bug fix.

New theme

We added a new theme called Typology. It allows for a lot of customization in Dashboard > Theme Options, but also looks good as soon as you activate it, without needing to make any changes. 

Help documentation for the theme is coming soon, but there’s also good documentation from the theme authors. 

Bug fix and other updates

There was a bug in the Discussion forum that appears on a Course, Project, or Club profile that was preventing any pages beyond the first page of discussion from showing. This has been fixed.

We made a few small text changes on the sign up page. One was to clarify that when we ask for your email address to sign up it won’t be displayed publicly on your Profile. We also adjusted the text in the avatar upload section to make it more clear that an avatar doesn’t have to be a picture of yourself – it can be anything that represents you or your interests. 

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As always, please contact us with any questions!

On January 23 we released version 1.7.73 of the OpenLab. It included some new features, as well as updates to all existing themes and plugins, including BuddyPress and WordPress, the two primary plugins that power the OpenLab. 

New Features and Functionality

We created additional post privacy options that appear on public sites, allowing you to choose from three different privacy options, for more fine-grained visibility choices when working in the open: 

• Everyone: This is the default setting, which matches the setting of the open site. 
• Site members: Only logged-in members of the site can see the post. 
• OpenLab members: Only logged-in members of the OpenLab can see the post.

You don’t need to activate anything. These options will appear automatically when a site is set to either “Allow search engines to index” or “Ask search engines not to index this site.”

We added a space for uploading an avatar when people first create an OpenLab account. We’re hoping this will encourage more members to add an avatar to their profile. It doesn’t have to be a picture of yourself – it can be a pet, a drawing, a photograph, or anything!

During the process of portfolio creation, the name and URL of the portfolio has always autofilled with the creator’s first initial and last name. It was possible to change it, but most people did not. In order to better protect members’ privacy and support people’s autonomy in how they choose to be identified on the OpenLab, we removed these default values so that portfolio title and URL must be filled in at the time of creation. People can choose to use their real name or their Display Name, which may not be the same. 

Plugins

We added four new plugins, and retired one plugin, CM Tooltip Glossary, in favor of a more accessible glossary plugin. The new plugins are:

TranslatePress 
We recently added the GTranslate plugin, which allows you to add an automatic translation option to your site. TranslatePress allows you to translate it manually, for a more accurate translation.

Reading Time WP 
This plugin adds an estimated reading time to posts and pages. 

WP Reading Progress 
Used alone or together with Reading Time WP, this plugin adds a progress bar to posts and pages, indicating to the reader how far along they are in the text.

Name Directory 
This plugin allows you to create a glossary, or multiple glossaries for your site. You can also allow others to submit glossary entries. 

Bug Fixes

We fixed an issue where the ‘Favorites’ dropdown in the OpenLab Toolbar was being skipped when navigating the site with a keyboard.

We made a few fixes to the OpenLab Attributions plugin to improve keyboard navigation, and to fix an issue preventing existing attributions from being edited.

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As always, please contact us with any questions!

On November 15 we released version 1.7.72 of the OpenLab. It included one feature improvement, minor theme and plugin updates, accessibility improvements, and a bug fix.

Adding social media to your profile

In the August release, we introduced a new way to add social media links to your profile. In this release, we improved the mobile interface so the experience is cleaner and easier to use.

Fixes

We made a number of small accessibility fixes around the site, to improve the experience for people using screen readers. 

We also fixed a bug in portfolio creation causing the template chooser containing available site templates to disappear when a template category was chosen from the dropdown menu.

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As always, please contact us with any questions!

On October 11 we released version 1.7.70 of the OpenLab. It included improvements to new features, minor theme and plugin updates, some retired plugins, and a few bug fixes.

Commenting

When embedding an image in a comment, we added a space to include an alt text description of the image.

We also made some improvements to the way links are added to make it a smoother experience.

OpenLab Connections

We made a few improvements to OpenLab Connections: 

• Added a notification to show when a change to the content you’re sharing with other groups has been made
• Clarified when invitations are pending or there’s an outstanding invitation to accept
• Improved the accuracy when searching for groups to send a connection invite

Retired plugins

We retired a number of plugins that are no longer being supported or had other issues: 

• WP Broken Link Status Checker (Broken Link Checker is a replacement for this)
• Edge Suite 
• Papercite 
• Watu Quiz 
• Quiz Maker 

Bug fixes

We made some small accessibility fixes around the site, mainly to improve the structure of headings on a few pages.

The Reckoning assessment plugin added in the August release was not visible in the site Dashboard. It now appears, and can be activated in Dashboard > Plugins. 

We fixed an issue causing the timestamps in email notifications to be 4 hours ahead of the actual time of site activity.

During Course, Project, Club, creation there was an incorrect error message that could appear when choosing the URL for a site. If there were invalid characters entered, the message would say “Sorry, that URL is already taken.” This has been fixed, and we’ve also made a change so that if spaces are included in a URL, instead of generating an error message they will be automatically converted to dashes. 

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As always, please contact us with any questions!