Messages & Forums 3.0 Release

Highlights

Forums

• Display profile photo alongside a user's forum posting   MSGCNTR-109
• Ability to add start and end dates to forums and topics   MSGCNTR-309
• Easily create topics for Groups   MSGCNTR-231
• New option to require a user to make a post before viewing other postings in a topic   MSGCNTR-411
• Duplicate a forum or topic MSGCNTR-390

Usability Enhancements

• Updated terminology
• Additional text to guide users on entry page, during grading, when posting in a moderated topic, and when setting watch status
• More consistent navigation
• More intuitive UI for forum and topic permissions

Messages

• Preview a message before sending it   MSGCNTR-310
• Option to save a message as Draft   MSGCNTR-355
• BCC option now available when composing a message MSGCNTR-329
• New permissions to allow finer-grained control over who may send to generic recipient groups (ie "All Participants, etc) MSGCNTR-401
• Ability to hide Groups from specified roles - MSGCNTR-438

Properties

For full details on the sakai.properties options in this release, see MSGCNTR-583.

mc.showShortDescription - Default True
Provide a way for an institution to remove the short description from the Forum/Topic settings view. If false, the short description will only be shown if it exists already.

mc.collapsePermissionPanel - Default False
Provide a way for an institution to default the permissions panel to collapsed in the Forum and Topic Settings screens.

msgcntr.editor.rows - Default 22
Allow users to customize the size of the WYSIWYG editor

msgcntr.synoptic.updateMessageCounts.updateNewMembersOnly - Default False
By setting this property, the synoptic counts job will only look for new members and add their synoptic count info. This is contrast to the default behavior, which is to update all site's members synoptic info, even if they already have data in the table.

msgcntr.synoptic.updateMessageCountsSiteFilter
In order to allow for updating synoptic counts (or populating missing counts in the case of the beginning of a semester), if you can filter out the synoptic counts job to update a specific range of sites, then it can be run quickly

msgcntr.synoptic.updateMessageCounts.addItemsWhenNoUnreadCounts - Default False
Allow the synoptic quartz job to update user's synoptic item (and add) even when forum and message counts are 0 for a site

msgcntr.forums.exclude.deleted - Default False
When a message is deleted, default behavior is to show a placeholder "Message Deleted" message. Setting this property to True will hide the deleted message and all of its child messages from user view. There will be no placeholder.

msgcntr.forums.showRevisionHistory - Default True
By default, each time a Forum message is edited, a note with the revision details is added to the message. Setting this property to False will no longer include revision details when a Forum message is edited.

mc.messages.ccEmailDefault - Default False
In the Messages tool, allow institution to set a preference as to whether the checkbox to "cc" the email address of the recipient is checked by default.

MSGCNTR-109 - Display profile pictures and link to profile information next to the message author
This feature is turned off by default since you must have profile2 installed.
msgcntr.forums.showProfileInfo - Default False
Set to true if you would like to display profile pictures when viewing messages in Forums.
profile2.profile.link.enabled - Default True
You may utilize this profile2 property to disable profile linking and pop-ups via the profile picture when viewing messages in Forums.

MSGCNTR-231 - Configuring the option to create topics for groups
msgcntr.groupsdefaultlevel - Defaults to Contributor level
The permission level that groups will receive by default

Define names of roles that by default will have 'None' level access when creating Group Topics. If this property is defined, the settings from the parent Forum will be used. For example, the following will default the Student and access roles to "None" permission level when creating group topics:
msgcntr.rolesnone.count=2
msgcntr.rolesnone.1=Student
msgcntr.rolesnone.2=access

Conversion