Commons 2.5 released with UX improvements and Question & Answers
The Commons team has released Commons 2.5 today. This is a significant release for a number of reasons, including some significant UX improvments. We also added Question & Answer functionality which is very important for both internal and external communities. There was a significant UX focus on this release with usability testing being very helpful. This was very informative and initiated a change in login/landing on the Activity Stream to a site landing page. This was validated in the usability testing, discussions with users and a survey of successful community sites. Here is a screenshot, you will now see your groups sorted by activity date (formerly alphabetical), Who's online, your posts & bookmarks along with featured content on the landing page.
The Groups page was also redesigned with the removal of the box tabs with designed pills. We also have filters for content types that streamlines the finding and creation of content. The compare and contrast images are impressive. The design folks did a nice job!
Once again, this release is now active on our site Commons.Acquia.com later today. It is important for us to continue to get feedback and validation as we aggressively look to improve Commons!
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Comments
It's great to see the new
It's great to see the new version on this site, and the new look. Much cleaner.
How is the Q&A implemented? I don't currently see this anywhere. Is this a Feature that can be enabled on a per group basis? What do the permissions look like?
Thanks for the improvements!
Feedback
It's good to know that Acquia is working on the improvement of Commons and happy to see the improvements from previous versions. I took a quick glance at this version and here are some issues that I think should be corrected:
- The right sidebar looks strange to me, the separation with the main content area should be smoother.
- The profile picture and the follow/unfollow links are not aligned. The follow/unfollow links seem to be part of a bulleted list, I think it shouldn't be that way.
- I would change the "Become user's follower" to "Follow" and get rid of the confirmation message.
- The "Users you follow" tab in "my relationships" still displays the awkward "Follower (YoutoThem)" cell, I think that column should be removed.
- The activity stream of some users displays a too big profile picture next to the activity message.
That's all I got for now, maybe I should have put this as a request in the issue queue, if so just let me know.
Regards,
Igor.
Thanks for the feedback
Thanks for the feedback everyone.
Igor, sounds like you have found several separate issues. There might be existing issues in the issue queue (http://drupal.org/project/issues/commons) so if there are, comment on those, and create new ones if needed.
And if you could link to those issues from a comment here, that would be great! we'll get more feedback that way.
Cheers,
Lisa
That's very great! I will
That's very great!
I will upgrade my site to this version in few days later.
Thanks
Groups page don't render properly in Internet Explorer
The default installation doesn't renders user stream posts properly as the avatar images take up a lot of the page any text typed is not seen.
The other thing is that the Link and Photo buttons don't work in Internet Explorer as when they are clicked the popup is not shown and the buttons disappear.
Issues when upgrading
First off, this major issue happened:
http://drupal.org/node/1413312
"Fatal error: Cannot access empty property in /home/myaccount/public_html/sites/mysite.com/modules/og/modules/og_views/includes/og_views_handler_field_og_invite.inc on line 35"
Second, many views were disrupted. For example, /groups no longer displays any groups - the view is still there with all the info, but displaying only the "empty" message. I recreated it at /group and the new one works.
Another view on our sidebar with a map of where our groups are based is also missing. I'll have to recreate it.
I'm guessing I'll find more missing views as I go along.
The addition of the context anon_home should be flagged for users say that we know there are changes to the homepage (maybe it was, but I didn't notice it).
Subscriptions Missing
Another major issue. People can't subscribe to content type in a group - the only option is "All Content Types". See here:
Enable it! :)
Hi Mark.
You just need to enable these options, please see my post @ Commons issue queue:
http://drupal.org/node/1449100#comment-5635594
Unfortunately, enabling some of subscribe / notification options will break Commons notification feature..
Great.
Great. Thanks so much for that. Simple when you know the answer.
Group Activity is not displaying correctly either for me
Group Activity is not displaying correctly either for me
Fixed
This fixed itself (I hope) quite simply be clearing the activity logs cache) - I didn't know there was an activity logs cache (and would have expected it to clear with a "clear all cached data" flush).
Activity is actually a mix
Activity is actually a mix between a content type, tokens, rules and triggers.
There's no cache system that can be cleared this way, the "clear Activity log" button just deletes all content of that type.
For more control over Activity log, I suggest that you create a custom view.
1 2
I have some errors and questions.
1. "Share" status not working on this and my sites. I Share status, and not seeing status, which I re-share, and not seeing "Share" button.
2. How to do this dropdown "Subscribe to:" menu?
UX upgrades
I think 2.5 looks great! I am looking forward to upgrading, however....One thing I am trying to find is a way to limit recent comments. It seems that if a comment is made for a blog post, etc. a recent comment is listed in the "Latest Comment" block for every group the comment was posted to. It makes the recent comment block cluttered and not worth including for high traffic groups. I could sure use a point in the right direction to administer this.
Thanks
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Views in 2.5
Is there something in 2.5 that affects views when adding new items to views? I am getting "Page not found" after "view main_feature_slider has been saved" notification
found
this one too
Removal of tabs on groups page
Just so I get it:
You have now removed the "Blog" "Discussions" "Documents" etc tabs that took you directly to the subpage with all that conent, and replaced it with search functionality?
So if I would like to go to the document section, I will have to choose "Documents" as content type, and the press "Apply"?
So there's no real "section" with documents, just a filtered list?
Previously the wiki-tab could be configured so the first wiki article could be on the top (featured) but now it's a list of wiki pages instead?
I'm not sure I've used to it enough to see the benefits, but I'll work with it some more and see if it grows on me.