CUNY Academic Commons

I think it would be too cumbersome to fix the sites already created.

Options A or C would be fine, I think - whatever is easiest to set up.

Ascribing the pages/posts to a user "Commons Admin" or "Commons Template" would hopefully alert people to the fact that these pages were created with the site.

Reassigning the pages and posts to the creator of the site would be fine too. Though this might confuse very new users since they will see that they have created pages but not understand that those pages/posts were pre-populated.

I lean towards solution A, but I guess one question is what people do with the draft content. If they will delete the pages/posts, I think it would be better for it to be authored by a generic commons user. If they will edit the page/post, I think that Option C would be best and better for the long run, as content created by users should be under their own names. Thoughts?

Thanks, all. I agree with Laurie that A is the best. It's technically easiest, and it makes clear that these are auto-generated posts.

I've created a user 'commonsadmin' and switched post_author for each post/page on the three template sites to this user. See eg https://academic-portfolio-template.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=page. If site admins want to change authorship of a post, they can do it themselves.

If others feel strongly that we need to do C instead, it's possible, but it will have to be a code-level change.

Thanks Boone. This sounds like a good, quick fix (instead of changing the code).

Are Site creators/admins able to change the author on the pre-populated pages/posts (that will now be attributed to commonsadmin? That way, for example, professors could change the "syllabus" page so that it's authored by them (as Matt suggested).

Yup, you can do this on a post-by-post basis (look for the 'Author' dropdown on the Block or Classic editor screen) or as a bulk action (on Dashboard > Pages, check multiple boxes, then choose Edit from the Bulk Actions dropdown and change the Author).

Okay, thats what i figured. Thanks, Boone

It might be worth adding directions on how to do that so folks can change the author if they want. I will work on adding that to our documentation.

sounds good. thanks, Boone

Circling back on this...I noticed on sites that use a template the back end author on pre-populated posts has been changed to "Commons Admin" as intended but on the front end it still says the post is by Paul Hebert (ex: https://authornametest.commons.gc.cuny.edu/)

This might be a function of the solution we chose for this issue and maybe the solution doesn't account for the display on the front end? Not sure, but I wanted to bring this up because I think the posts attributed to Paul (or Luke in the portfolio template) might confuse folks.

Laurie, can you clarify where you're seeing "Paul Hebert" on the front end? Is it in the Recent Comments widget?

On new sites launched from a template, default comments are attributed to Paul. Probably accounts for what Laurie notes above. Can we change this attribution to the generic Commons Admin account as well?

Thanks for the details. I've made the change to the following comment:

https://teaching-template.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/#comment-4

The default comments on the other posts are already attributed to fake users, so I think we're good to go here.