CUNY Academic Commons

Scott and I discovered that you can link an existing blog to a private or hidden group or go back to the admin panel and link a blog that was created separately after the group was created. It seems that the only thing that's not possible is enabling a new group blog while setting up the group.

Should this be the case? If so I will adjust the FAQs accordingly.

Awesome, that's a helpful clue. It shouldn't be like that IMO.

To add another note to this... Barbara Walters just created a hidden group and enabled the group blog without any problems. The link works fine and she granted me admin access. I can access the dashboard and post with ease.

She didn't realize that the blog would be public unless you went into the dashboard of the blog to change the privacy settings (which I did). She thought that because the group was private (hidden actually) that the blog would automatically be hidden. I definitely want to include a FAQ about that aspect, but before I go ahead with the FAQs we really need to understand the whole enabling group blogs thing.

Best,

Sarah

Thanks very much for this helpful update, Sarah.

I've been talking with Ron (who has come on to help with some WP development related to the Commons) just today about the group blogs plugin. It's messed up in some serious ways. I'd like him to finish some of the bug tracking he's doing right now before I take a serious look at what's wrong with the plugin - because if the plugin is causing #234 (which it might be), then we will may need to do a serious rewrite of the group blog plugin.

I think it would be best to map the privacy settings as a default, but to bring up an alert that tells new users about those aligned privacy settings and gives them a link to change the if they want to.

I'd say that the analogue to a hidden group would be a blog visible only to its members.

I agree that it's probably best to ask the user during the creation process, but that only reaffirms that the ticket needs to be moved to 1.1.

Just an update... private and hidden groups can now enable the group blog, but posts are visible to everyone unless the blog administrator adjusts the visibility of the posts or makes the entire blog private.

Best,

Sarah

Thanks for the update, Sarah.

For 1.1, the easiest thing to implement will be a simple message that reminds group admins, after they enable a group blog, that they should adjust the blog settings if they want it to be non-public. Anything more automated than that will take more development time that I would prefer to push off until after 1.1. What do others think?