CUNY Academic Commons

It wasn't much of a discussion, but no one raised any objections and a few people approved.

I think we should remove the box from the home page of the group. I really like the idea of making "Email Group" an admin function in it's own tab that is available only to admins.

I've built a little plugin that (a) removes the activity update posting box from the group home page; (b) adds an Announcements tab that everyone in the group can access. On the Announcements tab, if you're a group admin or mod (or site admin), you get a message saying that you can post announcements and send emails to the group, followed by all the most recent status updates (ie announcements) that have been left in the group. If you're not an admin or mod, you just see the list of announcements. This way, people can go back and see just the announcements that people have left for the group. Hopefully, classifying them as Announcmenets, and putting them on a different tab, will alleviate confusion with those who were starting discussions there.

The plugin exists in my local environment. I'll upload it to Git when I figure out the system a bit better. In the meantime, if you have suggestions or comments based on my (admittedly not great) description, please let me know.

Sounds great, Boone. Do you have some kind of help text that informs regular members of the group that only admins/mods can post announcements? How hard would it be to make this an option under admin settings of the group, so that admins could choose from three different settings: "Announcements can be made by 1. Only Admin; 2. Admin and Mods; 3. All group members). If that adds too much complication, or if you disagree with the idea, let me know.

But this sounds good -- looking forward to seeing it.

The "announcements can be made by" setting is an interesting idea. Maybe a v2 sort of thing. Don't want to overwhelm with options for the moment. Sounds reasonable?

Check out the feature on cdev and see what you think. Make sure to visit both as an admin/mod and as a normal member to see the differences.