Release Notes - 11th December 2008

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

Headline Enhancements

Article List Mini-layout

Mini-layouts are an exciting feature which provide a whole new level of control over the layouts within components, giving you ultimate flexibility in the way that you can customise the look of your site.

We first added a mini-layout to the shop item listing component to give you greater control over the presentation of shop items. In this release we've brought mini layouts to the article list component, so that you can now fully customise the way that lists of articles appear on your site.

At the same time we've also added a mini-layout area to the main Themes and Layouts page in the Settings area of the Web Office where you can add and edit mini-layouts.

View a demonstration video of the article list mini-layout feature.

'My Financial Reports' - Receipts, Gift Aid and Payment Commitments
If a user has registered on a payment group on your website they get access to a page called "My Financial Reports". From this page, they have access to reports on any financial transactions they have carried out on your site, mirroring the data that was previously only available to administrators in the Web Office. The "My Financial Reports" page gives access to three reports:
- My Receipts - view receipts for all payments recorded on the site, including payments for registrations and shop items.
- My Assignments - view details of what the receipts were for, and download tax receipt PDFs for all Gift Aid assignments.
- My Receivables - view past and future payment commitments

All these reports are customisable by date range, and allow filtering on a number of different criteria according to the report type.

Mailing Channel Querying
One of our headline features in the last release was Mailing Channels. They offer a big advantage over using a mailing list or user group folder for mailings because they have a preferred correspondence method associated with them. This enables each user to remove themselves from selected mailings without necessarily removing themselves from all mailings from your site, and without removing themselves from a particular group.

Mailing channels all appear under the mailing preferences page, making it easy for users to manage their subscription options. For more information on mailing channels and a video of how to set them up see the Release notes - 11th November 2008.

In this release we've extended the Query wizard, so that you can now query users according to the mailing channels they are subscribed to. You can then use the results of the query to change subscriptions en masse. This means you can now move everyone from an existing mailing list to a mailing channel and view which users have a particular mailing preference for your mailing channel.

Other enhancements/Bug fixes

Audio/Video Flash Uploader - Our Audio/Video Flash uploader stopped working for users who had installed the latest Flash player (Flash Player 10). This was down to security changes Adobe made in the last release of the flash player. This has now been fixed with this update to our Audio/Video uploader tool. Also included are enhancements to the non-flash uploader tool and changes to the explanatory text.
Saving a Theme speeded up - If you do any work with themes and layouts you'll probably have got used to going off and making a cup of tea every time you needed to save a theme. We've fixed that, and themes now save lightning fast!
Payment groups
- We turn off automatic collection of outstanding receivables when payment group registrations are cancelled. However, automatic collection was not being turned off for a small number of receivables - in particular, partially paid receivables on superseded registrations. We've now closed this loophole.
- When listing payment schemes that are available for Gift Aid, we no longer list the schemes individually if all are available.
Query wizard
- We've made some minor improvements to the user interface, including the display of tasks, and scrolling in Internet Explorer.
- Re-ordering the results of certain queries was timing out; this has now been fixed.
Financial Reports - The placement of the "Change columns" dialog box has been fixed so that it now displays on screen.
Mini-layouts can now be edited from the main Theme & Layout editing page.
Rotas - Tasks containing groups could not have further users or groups added to them. This has now been fixed.
Organisation directory - A fix to the display of the list of organisations in Internet Explorer.
User import - A fix to a bug which caused the user import wizard to fail when sending emails to new users.
Shop - The default status for digital-only orders for which payment has been fully received is now "Completed".