CUNY Academic Commons

As discussed on the dev call yesterday, I just spent some time seeing what might be adaptable from the help site's new custom theme to this work on the news site design.

I had trouble cloning the entire large help site, but I set up a posts archive page in the background that I think aligns pretty well with what the theme would show by default right now on a "blog" home page, which is basically all that we would need for the news site homepage:

https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/posts-archive/

I changed out the header image to a Commons art image, but it doesn't cover the header area very well by default. I stopped there, because I wasn't sure how easy it would be to do further customization. Ray, do you think we could use this as the basis of a new design, the way blocks etc. work on the page? Or would it be better to start more from scratch?

Sara, maybe without doing a full mockup just yet, it might be good to know what you envision for the new design and if the simplicity of this basic homepage gets close in any way. I do like that it gets rid of the sidebar, both on the home and individual post pages. Perhaps the homepage would be good to make more visual, with featured images and a some sort of layout that isn't just linear reverse-chronological post excerpts.

Hi Colin - Just a FYI. When I created the new Help site, I made big changes to the FSE theme's templates.

Just bumping this old ticket after redesigning the News site came up in the meeting on Friday. Sara, my link above adapting Scott's redesign of the Help site to a simple post-by-post display might not be what you have in mind at all, or it might be a good starting point. Let us know what you think about some of my questions above, and perhaps we can determine whether:

- We should explore building a new theme from scratch, and how resource-intensive that would be
- We can adapt another Wordpress theme that is already out there
- We can work off of the Help site theme or some other internal template of ours

Hi Colin, Do you think you can clone the current news site so that I can play around with it on the commons and try out customizing a few themes? Thanks!

Sure, I set that up as a private site here and just invited you to become an admin:

https://newsclone.commons.gc.cuny.edu/