Uncategorized

• Downtime, Profiles Data Bug, and a Round of More Positive Technical Updates

  tl;dr: We’ve had some downtime due to AI bots hammering us. We’re working on it. We had another bug where profile fields disappeared. We fixed it (duplicate metadata in the wp_bp_xprofile_field table). We’re doing lots of cool new development work. When big corporate players have problems or downtime, they tend to hide them and see…

• Utrecht University Joins Knowledge Commons as a Sustaining Member

  

  We are excited to share that Utrecht University in Utrecht, Netherlands is joining Knowledge Commons as a sustaining member! Their participation will help us to continue supporting our community of researchers, educators, students, and creators as they discover open works, connect with their peers, and share their valuable contributions to our collective knowledge. We are…

• Announcing KCWorks for Institutions: a hosted repository that works for you

  It is our great pleasure today to announce the launch of KCWorks for Institutions: a fully hosted best-in-class repository service for your institution. The Knowledge Commons team knows that there are many institutions that rely on corporate-owned hosted repository services, and our goal is to provide not just better value, but also better values. We…

• Behind the scenes of #ResearchSpotlights

  The #ResearchSpotlights social media campaign for Knowledge Commons has been ongoing since April 2023. Since then, many hands have taken up mining the KC repository, KCWorks, to share the exciting and varying works that people worldwide add to it. Many of these hands have been graduate students within the English department at Michigan State University,…

• Ensuring the Reliability and Durability of the Knowledge Commons Infrastructure

  How do you know, at any infrastructure, that your backups and disaster-recovery procedures work? You can have the most extensive backup procedures in the world, but if you have never tested it, you will not know, for absolute certain, that you can resurrect things in a disaster. Lots of the infrastructure that we use at…

• Getting external access to BuddyPress’s notifications (or: distributing Knowledge Commons)

  Crossposted from Martin Paul Eve, “Getting external access to BuddyPress’s notifications (for Knowledge Commons)”, https://eve.gd, February 18, 2025, https://doi.org/10.59348/gpbaz-kx09. As part of my work on Knowledge Commons, I want to make more of our development process open, welcoming, and transparent, by using blogging. So I will be writing some technical posts on what I’m doing…

• Accessibility 101: Getting Started on your Commons Site

  As you go to create a Commons site for showcasing your research or blogging your academic journey, it’s important to consider how you are presenting your information so that it reaches the largest possible audience. As a crucial part of that audience, people with disabilities often get excluded from the online conversation when websites are…

• Interoperability and the Commons

  The Commons behaves like a network of sites: Humanities Commons, MLA Commons, MSU Commons, SAH Commons, ARLIS/NA Commons, HASTAC Commons, and about 3,000 WordPress sites operated by our users. All of these sites are in reality a single WordPress instance with a single filesystem and a single database. As I discussed previously in “A Federated…

• Building the Commons Update: July 2023

  In the first half of the year, our focus has been on improving our backend infrastructure and building strong foundations for future development. As we move into the second half of 2023, we will continue to improve our backend but you should start to see more user-facing improvements as a result of that work. Later…

• Building the Commons Update: May 2023

  Over the past month The Commons hasn’t had any significant user-facing updates, but we have many some behind-the-scenes improvements and we have been making steady progress on many projects. To better communicate all of these projects, we have created a public roadmap on the Building blog. If want an overview of all the things we’re…