CUNY Academic Commons

Hi Scott,

Thanks for looking into this and the awesome documentation on the tools.

I agree that TimelineJS is likely the more cumbersome option as it shifts the complexity of timeline design to an external space (google sheets) but it does standardize the final design of timeline and can be viewed either from the live link or through an embed iframe on the Commons. I think this is the more portable timeline option but I agree that it is more complicated for people looking for a simple timeline tool.

I also just want to note that I like how the Timeline JS tools doesn't add any options/areas to the site dashboard (it just makes the shortcode work) and I noticed that the two other timeline tools create additional dashboard spaces and custom categories, which might be confusing if users are actively using the timeline tools.

But, to your point, the other two are probably easier to work with since they mrun within the dashboard so this eases onboarding and user for new users. I would agree we can remove "timelineJS" from digital tools package and replace with "post timeline" plugin.

Boone, are you the one to make this change? If I can do it myself just let me know.

Ray, I see the part of the cac-plugin-packages plugin where this is defined, but perhaps you could make the change just to be safe?

Also, I noticed that the download_url param in the plugins array points to specific versions that are way out of date. From what I can see, these URLs aren't actually used anywhere in the plugin, in which case it doesn't matter. But I wanted to raise the issue in case there was some change we should make to the way that the URLs work (ie point to the latest from wordpress.org instead of a specific version) or the way the plugin works.

For the post-timeline description in our plugin packages, I added the following:

Allows users to create timelines to add to your site.

But feel free to provide me with a better description.