Release Notes - 12th November 2008

These are the release notes for the latest updates to the Insight platform. As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

Headline Enhancements

Tagging - a way to label related content

Tagging, put simply, is the ability to add keywords to a virtual "item" in much the same way as you would stick labels on a physical object. You can add any number of tags to your item and use them in future to find that item more easily. You can see great examples of tagging in use in places like google's Gmail service, or flickr.

In this release we're pleased to announce that you can now add tags to audio & video recordings, articles and events. Tags are then picked up by the site search and can also appear at the base of an article or in the new "Tag Cloud" component.

You add tags select the content item you wish to tag (currently tags can only be added in the Web Office). Remember it's articles, events or Audio/Video recordings only that can be tagged currently. Where you change the item's title, and other properties, you will now see a "Tags" edit box where you can type in the tags you wish to label your content with. Note the "Tags" area has replaced the "Keywords" field in Audio/Video recording so will be filled automatically with any "keywords" you added previously.

Watch a demonstration video of the new "Tagging" feature.

In future we'll be using tagging to allow you to filter article, media and event lists.

Mailing Preferences

This release sees some major upgrades to the way your site members can choose to receive mailings from your organisation.

Up until now the "my profile" had a single "mailing preference" option to select how they wanted to receive mailings - by post, by email, not at all. At the same time we've always used groups to represent sub-sets of your site members who might want to receive a specific mail - for example you might have a "missionaries" newsletter group, or a monthly bulletin group.

The problem we've found is that if a site member doesn't want to receive a particular piece of mail they've only got two options - if they get the mail because they're the member of a group they can leave the group (which may not be ideal for your organisation admin), or they can set their mailing preference to "no correspondence" and so miss out on all mail.

This is where the new mailing channels feature comes in. Think of them as "mailing lists" which people can subscribe to - a mailing channel for the monthly newsletter, one for prayer bulletin, another for those who support your missionary staff. You can create an unlimited number of mailing types. Every site starts with just one - a "default" used for general purpose mails.

Now when your site member receives a mailing they no longer wish to receive, there's a new smart unsubscribe link which gives them the option to stop receiving mail sent to that channel in future (even if they can't remember their login details). There's also a new 'My Mailing Preferences' area under the 'My Area' menu option. The user can change their Mailing Preferences here for all mailing channels they are part of.

New mailing channels can be created under the Settings->Emails->Mailing Channels option by users with the 'Full administrator' permission.

Watch a demonstration video of the new "mailing channels" feature.

Simple Password change page

A number of you have asked for a simplified change password page to replace the options in "my profile" - so here it is! A new option appears under "my area" where you can enter your current password and the new password in a simple form. As with all the "my area" items you can hide this option using the menu bar component configuration options.

The option to change your password on the "my profile" page has now been replaced by a link to the new, simpler page.

My Area options restructured

With the addition of the new "change password" page described above, and the new "mailing preferences' page, we've decided to restructure the "my area" menu options to make it simpler to navigate, and so we can easily add new options in the future.

Note the "my profile" page now appears under "my details", and the "my involvement" page is now the gateway to all the other options that relate to your involvement in the site i.e. "my reminders" etc. The area to change group memberships, that previously was titled "my involvement", is now called "my membership".

Social Bookmarking Component

You can now add a "social bookmarking" component to any layout. This works in conjunction with addthis - so if you have your own addthis account you can continue to track how people are bookmarking your site. Or, if you prefer, you can just add the component to the page and start using it straight away.

This component enables user's to easily share your site content with social networking sites like Facebook, Digg, Delicious, by email or simply bookmark it in their browser or Google account.

Performance Improvements

Many improvements have been made recently to increase the performance of your website. These include:

Further improvements to the performance of our search tools - both for general site searches and shop searches.
Performance improvements to some common group membership routines.
With ever increasing numbers of emails going through our system performance improvements have been made to the sending emails process.
Significant performance enhancements to the address book feature - which should result in much faster browsing experience for large address books.
The google map report (the one which plots your site members by geographical location) has been updated to improve performance.

RSS enhancements

The RSS Reader component has been re-vamped to improve the way feeds are loaded - so you shouldn't see the "please refresh the page" message in future.
We've also added support for Media RSS in the RSS reader component so you can display a ticker filled with media items that link to the relevant media files. This could be used to display links to Audio/Video files from other websites.
The Media RSS format now includes "link" information for images where applicable. Link information for images can be set in the image properties window. For those people using the google ajax media slideshow API this means that images can now be linked to content.
Menu XML enhancements - The menu xml now allows you to store multiple configurations in the same way as the media xml. You can also now set a maximum depth to reduce the number of sub-menus in the feed.
Document files XML option for media list component - If you're using the media list component to display document files you can now display a link to a Media RSS feed of these items.

Other Enhancements and Bug fixes

Audio/Video recordings are now searched in the general site search.
The Drop-down menu component's level depth can now be restricted.
Javascript, XML file uploads - The "upload a document file" task in the media tab now allows a number of new file types including .js, .xml, .css, .xaml and .html. Great news if you're adding custom javascript or flash to your site. We've also added the path to the file to make it much easier to locate this file afterwards, so you can incorporate it into your work.
Image linked to audio/video recording - fixed a problem with linking images, from the image layout component, to audio/video recordings.
Update to Google map types to their new specification to fix the Google map plotting.
Multi-select fields can now be added to query results. Previously they could be selected in the Query criteria but not displayed in the results.
IE7 layout editing - fixed a couple of display issues with the layout editor in Internet Explorer.
Firefox Theme style color editing - Theme palette control re-positioned correctly when editing a style's color in the Firefox browser.
Flash video player - update to correct display problems when a page including the flash player has been refreshed in internet explorer.
Map location selector - We've upgraded the location selector tool in the Map component that fixes the issue that was preventing people from selecting a specific map location.
Recurring events are now restricted to a maximum of 1000 events. This prevents an erroneously configured event from generating millions of events and impairing performance.

E-commerce enhancements

Single download of digital files

People who buy multiple digital items from the shop/store can now download all their purchases with a single click using a new java based download tool. Customers who do not have java installed can still download files separately.

Shop Item Related Categories

Items in your shop have always belonged to a "primary" category (usually the category where it was created), as well as a number of other "related" categories. From this new release items which are "related" into a category can now feature in any search results, special offers and sales reports which apply to that category.

So for example - lets say you want to give 20% off a range of products over December. Simply create a new category called "December 20% deals", add that category as a related category on each item you want to give discount on and create your special offer.

The Items list in the Web office now also has the option to display items which have been "related" into the category, so you can easily see all the items that would be displayed in this category the user-side store.

Shop Item Reviews - Reviews for items in the store now use the grid styling elements in your theme.

Apostrophe handling in Shop Items - fix to issue with apostrophes in shop item titles preventing some shop reports to be displayed correctly.

New in the financial reports area is the "Payment Processor Reconciliation Report" - allowing you to cross-check website payment activity against your payment processor.