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/

Sara, for the redesign you've been working on, did you base it off of a particular theme? Is it one we have on the Commons already if so? I wasn't sure from looking at the clone link that I made.

And if it's just a mock up at this point, can you post the image files so I can refresh my memory?

Also Ray or Boone, can you make me an admin of https://in.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ or let me know who the admins are, and maybe I can have them do it? I think that I can do a quick export of the posts and get them in to the current News site right now, so that's ready in advance for when the In Common sidebar goes away with the redesigned site.

Hello Colin, for some reason (I don't remember why) I had experimented with the news site locally on my machine. What is the best way to clone it to the commons? or should I re-create it there? It's based on twentytwentyfour

Hi Sara, I'm assuming the experimenting you did was all on the theme on your local Wordpress install? Could you navigate to wp-content/themes there, pull a copy of the active theme folder, and attach it here as a zip? For good measure, maybe go to Tools>Export in your local Wordpress dashboard and send a zip of all content from that as well.

Sara, if you used the Site Editor to do your mods, then the xml file is probably enough to import to a test site.

I tried uploading the xml file here:

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

And then I switched to the 2024 theme Sara mentioned. I don't think it's all carried over, unfortunately. Maybe it will be easier to talk through this a little on the call shortly.

Yes, we can talk this through on the call.

Colin, in the meantime, I've made you an admin on https://in.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/ so you can get what you need.

Thanks, Sara. Colin, please let me know when you've got the URL of the site you'd like me to import to. Again, note that my import will wipe out all existing content on the site (you can re-import the news content afterward).

Hi Boone, let's use this site we were already playing with. It's ok if everything gets wiped out.

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

Then as discussed on the call, once we fine tune this live on production over the coming days, we'll need to transfer the theme and associated settings to:

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

Thanks, Colin. I've performed the import: https://newsclone.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Most of the content you need is already here, because Sara had it on her local site.

Sara, as discussed, you may need to manually fix the header logo.

Let me know if you have questions as you work.