[Ed Beck]

Troy,

Thank you for your response. I really appreciate your experience and you taking the time to share that.

[Ed Beck]

Hi Bree!

Just wanted to chime in and say that looks like a really nice feature in development.

I like that it makes sure that the instructor doesn’t need to know who has an account or not, they can just bulk add a list of students, and then CBOX separates them into the two groups. “These users already have an account and are all set” “these users need to setup their openlab accounts still, do you want to add anything custom to the email message” and they can send it right off.

Ed

[Ed Beck]

Do you need a separate bug report or issue on Github that this particular cron job isn’t working by default? Are there any other OpenLab cron jobs that are missing from this list?

For the short term, I will add it manually from WP Crontrol.

[Ed Beck]

Hi Boone,

After installing WP Crontrol, there are only 12 cron jobs on my OpenLab site:

Hook, Recurrence

wp_privacy_delete_old_export_files,  Once Hourly

wp_version_check, Twice Daily

wp_update_plugins, Twice Daily

wp_update_themes, Twice Daily

update_netowrk_counts, Twice Daily

ass_digest_event, Once Daily

wp_site_health_scheduled_check, Once Weekly

recovery_mode_clean_expired_keys, Once Daily

wp_scheduled_delete, Once Daily

delete_expired_transients, Once Daily

wp_scheduled_auto_draft_delete, Once Daily

ass_digest_event_weekly, Once Weekly

 

Can you confirm that I should be seeing more. All but two are the core wordpress jobs, and I do not see any Buddy Press jobs added.

[Ed Beck]

Hi Boone,

I just wanted to let you know, that at least for external sites, that is not our experience at all. Specifically for external sites that are syncing through RSS, our lived experience is that until someone specifically visits that group, no emails or notifications go out.

For example:

geneseo.sunycreate.cloud is an OpenLab running the most recent version.

https://geneseo.sunycreate.cloud/groups/ed-beck/ is the url of a portfolio group.

Instead of subdomain, this group is connected to an external wordpress site. When I read your comments, I visited that site, and immediately 2 emails were sent out, my two most recent blog posts. Those posts were dated January 13th and March 7th. So I don’t think that group cron ran once between January and now until I visited that group page.

I will install the plugin you recommended, and see if there is another issue going on, but I wanted to let you know that we are seeing similar behavior on multiple OpenLab sites running the most recent version.

[Ed Beck]

If you look at this example:

https://jadestrauss-portfolio.oneonta.sunycreate.cloud/

I’m talking about the SUNY Oneonta logo that might not look as good on a shorter header. I also like the concept of a universal header, so it would be a bit of a bummer if my suggestion would be to turn off the header, but I also want a good fix for these students.

Ed

[Ed Beck]

I spent some time thinking about your problem today Troy.

Our Commons in a Box Openlab is hosted on Reclaim Hosting. One thing that I noticed early on about their blog, was that they used 1 WordPress blog as a hub, but that was really just an aggregator, and when you clicked on the link, you actually were brought to each one of the team members individual sites.

Check it out:

https://reclaimhosting.com/blog/

Is the central hub, but if you click on any story in the blog role, you are actually transported to the original place on the website. Might be Jim’s blog at https://bavatuesdays.com/ or Meredith’s at https://meredithfierro.com/ or Tim’s at https://blog.timowens.io/.

Basically they have a plugin that converts posts from an RSS feed into WordPress post, while simultaneously linking back to the home base blog.

I think it would be exactly what you are looking for, because it could turn the course blog into a one-stop shop, and if there were students that wanted to just share some of their posts with the course blog, they could do a category and give their instructor their category rss feed instead of their entire blog rss feed.

The only trouble is, I can’t figure out what plugin they are using!

Closest I can was this article of paid and free RSS aggregators.

https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/best-rss-to-post-wordpress-plugins/

Ed

[Ed Beck]

The theme is iKnow: https://wordpress.org/themes/iknow/

Yes, we just copy and pasted content since it was shared with a creative commons license. I guess eventually we will be able to clone from site to site. I’m happy to share anything I can if it is helpful, like I could share a backup file of what we are using. It is still a work in progress though!

[Ed Beck]

Are you able to do a database search?

Maybe you could try to search the database for the PDF embedder shortcode?

[Ed Beck]

One of the things I learned from my exploration of the help pages was that City Tech uses a couple extra plugins on their server that seem to be required to make the OpenLab Help pages work properly.

For example. We couldn’t get the help pages to show up in the same order in the body and in the sidebar.

Later Bree comments on that thread:

<div>Just to follow up on Charlie’s message, these are the plugins we use for City Tech OpenLab Help:</div>

• Ambrosite Next/Previous Post Link Plus – for next/back navigation
• Category Order and Taxonomy Terms Order – to determine the order of categories (which are used for the sidebar menu)

<div>And I’m happy to answer any other questions I can!</div>

<div>What we decided to do at Oneonta was to create a project site, and manage our help pages as a separate subdomain. This is what my intern Jade came up with this semester:</div>
<div></div>
<div>https://help.oneonta.sunycreate.cloud/</div&gt;
<div></div>
<div>We were happy that we could find a theme that was created for a knowledge base, and that we could build and elaborate from there.</div>

[Ed Beck]

Hi Syelle,

This isn’t possible using the front end controls of OpenLab, but it could be possible to do in the database. I asked that exact question on github. Read BooneBGorges Aug 7th response:

https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/commons-in-a-box/issues/290

“There’s no place in the interface to change the ‘slug’ of a group type, because if you change it, it will break all existing permalinks – external links to the site, internal links that are stored in the database rather than generated dynamically, etc. If you want to make the change manually, find the items in your wp_posts table with post_type = 'cboxol_group_type'. You can change the post_name value on those entries.”

 

[Ed Beck]

Hi Bree,

I can reproduce a disappearing top menu on my site. Using the OpenLab theme:

The top menu does not always have graceful fallback for mobile responsive.

• On oneonta.sunycreate.cloud at Laptop Width (1024 px) the top menu is present at usable.
• When we drop down to iPad Width (768 px) the top menu disappears and is not usable.
• However, it isn’t until (425 px) that the drop-down alternative to the top menu appears.

So it appears that there is a gap in the CSS for medium size screens where the top menu isn’t usable but the mobile replacement hasn’t been included. The bottom menu operates on slightly different rules, where the bottom menu will still appear on iPad sized screens, but it will sometimes take up two lines instead of 1.

(This may be an unrelated issue, but I think it describes why help may appear sometimes and not other times)

[Ed Beck]

Why is the network administration link disabled for super admins anyway?

I mean, I know I just have to add /network when I am on the menu, but it is a little weird at first. The only reason I knew where to go is I have managed Multisites before.

[Ed Beck]

Hi Greg,

You are locked into using a theme on the main site where you must use the OpenLab Theme.

However, on each subsite, you can use whatever themes you would like.

To do this, you have to install the themes and activate them from the network menu. For new admins this can be a little tricky, because OpenLab disables the link to the network admin.

To get there go to yoursiteurl.com/wp-admin/network where you replace yoursiteurl.com with your main site. From there, go to the theme menu and install as many themes as you like. Child sites can use any theme that is installed and enabled. I have these themes installed and enabled:

• AeonBlog
• Ariel
• Astra
• Fluida
• Gutenix
• IKnow
• Liquido
• Lyrical
• Miniva
• NanoSpace
• Neve
• NewsPortal
• NewsPortal Mag
• OceanWP
• OpenLab
• Period
• Primer
• Storefront
• Twenty Nineteen
• Twenty Seventeen
• Twenty Twenty
• Zeko Lite

  I think most of those themes would do menus the way you want them with dropdowns.

[Ed Beck]

I can replicate on my site.

[Author]

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