Another month - more exciting updates about Wild Apricot integrated website and membership management software. We appreciate ongoing comments and suggestions - and Wild Apricot keeps evolving to address your feedback.

Our early February release included:

• Ability to add multiple private website sections, e.g. one section for regular members, another one for premium members, yet another for the board etc.

• Saved searches. Create a search as usual, save it - and instantly re-run it later on. Here is a quick visual illustration:
  

• Search Engine Optimization Tools - Editing page titles and meta-tags (keywords, description, raw headers). This is helpful for search engine optimization of your Wild Apricot website - and for some special cases like site verification for Google Apps email or Google Webmaster tools:

(This change means you can use a favicon for your website - see http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Inserting+favicon+ico )

• Function to delete all member records (e.g. to re-import)

• Enhancements to Advanced search , including Search by exclusion 'Is not' and search of date fields by period (this/last month/year).
• Ability to change group administrator for group membership levels
• Member profile page customization - ability to select fields which are used as page heading. For example business associations might want to use organization name while clubs and other groups can use a person's name
• Event start and end times are now actual time fields instead of text fields they were. This ensures that event will be properly sorted in the list, in the RSS feed and when it's imported into desktop calendar like Outlook or iCalendar.

For more information see http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/0.+Release+history

We are hard at work on our next release - planned for the first week of March.

Big focus for future release is to improve manual management of transactions. Wild Apricot by design focuses on online transactions with emphasis on member self-service. However, there are always pesky exceptions :-) - people who do not want to pay online, registrations which do not go through on the first try and so on. The best systems are the ones that not only automate 'normal situations' but also gracefully handle exceptions. We have to admit that Wild Apricot had a number of gaps in this area - and here are the improvements coming up in our March release:

• Ability to manually add new attendees to an event - both members and non-members
• Functionality to manually renew a member by the administrator
• Record a donation received offline
• People who tried to apply for membership and had their online payment fail on the first try can now re-try the payment (no need to re-enter the data)

You will also see:

• Significantly increased file size upload limits (for pictures, PDFs etc.)
• Rich text formatting available to members in blog and discussion forum modules
• Ability to specify a custom currency
• System performance improvement (We have uncovered that system was randomly slowing down for about 5 minutes several times each day so we had to hunt down and revise the code responsible for these glitches)

Items at the top of the list for subsequent releases include:

• Customization of member database fields separately for each level
• Integrated online payment (built-in credit card entry screen and processing so that people do not have to go to the PayPal website)
• Overhaul of our hosting infrastructure (tripling the number of our servers)
• More visual design options and customization capabilities
• Allowing member records without email
• Customization of donation form

We really do appreciate the ongoing input from all of you - keep it coming and be assured that every comment is being analyzed and taken into consideration.