Release Notes - 12th August 2010

We've released a host of new features across a whole range of areas in the Insight platform. As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

More media features

We've kept up the momentum on introducing great new media features with some changes that help you produce even better looking media rich layouts.

On pages where you have an embedded video player, but don't want the video to start playing immediately, the recording's summary image is now displayed in the player until the play button is pressed. This means you no longer get the empty black player ruining your otherwise perfect layout!

Recognizing that you sometimes need more than one image to summarize a recording, we have added the option for an 'alternative image' which you can include in your media list mini-layouts. This can be used, for example, to include a mugshot of the speaker.

MP3 files can now play in the embedded player, so they no longer need the pop-up player.

When a media list item has finished playing, you now have the option to set the list to play automatically the next item in the list. This allows you to create a rolling playlist. The currently playing item is highlighted in the list.

You can now also configure your media lists to play the item in a player on another page when clicked. This could be used to play media in a list on your homepage in a specific group where there was a media list showing other related videos.

Find out who has read your mailings

Insight already has a powerful click-tracking feature that shows you who has clicked on links in your mailings, but sometimes you just want to know who has opened the mail, or who your message might not be getting through to.

In this release, we've added a great feature that counts up how many people have opened your mail. We do this by adding a link to a tiny 1-pixel image in the footer and we log when this is downloaded. This feature requires the mailing to be in the HTML format, it therefore can't be used on plain text mailings.

Note that some email clients have image downloading blocked by default - and if the reader chooses not to download images then we are unable to tell if the mail has been read. So, we can tell you if someone has definitely opened your mail, but we can't say they definitely haven't!

The new count appears in a column 'Read by' where sent mails are listed in the Mailing Wizard.

Documents can be hidden from the site search

With increasingly sophisticated layout options now available, documents are used in the system for much more than readable content. For example, some will just have custom scripts or CSS, or will be placeholders for further layout components.

In the document editor, on the 'Properties' tab, there is now the option to 'Hide from site search', which does exactly what it says on the tin. You can now ensure that documents that don't have readable content - or any other documents that you just don't want cluttering up search results - are excluded when users search your site. The documents are still visible and accessible in every other normal way.

More layout flexibility for the Group Navigation component

We've added mini-layout functionality to the 'Group Navigation' layout component to give you ultimate flexibility over how the contents of these components are laid out. For an introduction to mini-layouts.

In addition, you can now add a summary image to groups that you can use in your mini-layouts. You'll find this setting under the 'Advanced Options' section on the group's 'Summary' tab in the Web Office.

These new group thumbnails are also now supported in the Slideshow Pro media XML format.

New options for manipulating organizations and staff in the Query Wizard

In the Query Wizard, when you run a query on users or organizations, you can now convert your results to a set of distinct 'staff roles' for these users or organizations.

When you have your query results, you'll find the new option under "Associated Selections" in the Tasks area - "Get a distinct selection of roles for these users/organizations".

Other enhancements and bug fixes

Images can now have captions of up to 1000 characters (the previous limit was 200)
The percentage results for polls were occasionally not adding up to 100, due to rounding errors. We've fixed this.
We have corrected some errors on the shop sales reports that were due to incorrect time zone conversions.
Also in the store, there was a rare error when certain combinations of offers were applied which meant that customers could not complete the checkout. This is now fixed.
Donation-type items that were set to be hidden were still appearing at the checkout stage. This behavior has been corrected.
In the 'Manage Bad Emails' area of the Mailing Wizard, you would get an error when trying to remove users from groups. This has been fixed.
There was an error linking to images in the Internet Explorer and Chrome browsers which is now fixed.

Let us know what you think!

We'd love to hear your comments on our latest release, so leave a comment below and let us know what you think!