CUNY Academic Commons

Thanks for getting us started on these updates, Laurie. I think they'll make a big difference on teaching courses and elsewhere when the templates are helpful.

I'm adding Boone and Ray here as watchers to confirm that changing the themes you linked will update the default theme for any new sites that select the respective template.

I agree about focusing on updating the New Sites and Teaching themes. Portfolios/Academic and Conferences are more updated and pretty niche, so we might want to research/test more before changing those.

For the New Sites one, going from 2020 to 2022 seems like a good idea. It's a good aesthetic update, and it's also nice that 2022 has the new site editor built in:

https://wordpress.com/support/site-editor/

This would also work nicely with this documentation Scott's already made:

https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/full-site-editing/

For Teaching, I'll admit that I've used 2020 a lot lately and tend toward simpler and responsive sites, at least as courses are just getting going and don't have a lot of content (sometimes the theme then just sticks around, though). I like Radiate and could see that working well -- do you have a link or two to a course site using Radiate?

I'll think on other possibilities there. I suppose 2022 would be one, but we may want to mix it up.

I'm adding Boone and Ray here as watchers to confirm that changing the themes you linked will update the default theme for any new sites that select the respective template.

Confirmed. The site templates or "layouts" are simply prototype sites. Their settings, content, etc are copied in their entirety to newly created sites. Changing any configuration on the template sites, including the theme, will result in those configurations being copied to new sites using the layout.

It's okay with me if we switch to Twenty Twenty-Two for one or more of the templates. But we should be prepared that, by making it the default theme for at least some use cases, many more users will find themselves using the Site Editor than is currently the case. So we should make sure we're happy with the documentation (and links to external documentation, as necessary).

I agree with Boone that Twenty-Twenty-two might be confusing to those who want to set up teaching sites. Maybe Twenty-Twenty-one would be better, since it does not have the (Beta) Site Editor.

Moving away from the standard WP yearly themes, I suggest we go with Polite Minimal (https://wordpress.org/themes/polite-minimal/), as the new default theme for the teaching template.

Tested here: http://lbhdev.org/teachingtemplate-test/

Its clean, simple, easy to understand for a new user, but also has a lot of theme options. What do you all think?

I would recommend we keep the Conference an Academic Portfolio themes the same. I also think we may want to consider renaming "academic portfolio to "faculty portfolio" to deter undergrads from selecting this template.

That theme looks good on the test site Laurie. Let's see what Scott thinks. Changing from Academic Portfolio to Faculty Portfolio sounds better but I wonder if some students going there to set up a portfolio will still be confused. Maybe being contact with the program about it as you suggested on Tuesday will help too, though.