The spring is here. (Kinda of - Toronto is still very cold with piles of snow on the streets!)
We did some spring cleaning for our March 6th update: Making it easier/more straightforward to handle exceptional situations - like manual
entry of transactions by administrators or payments failed on the first
try. It might not sound as glamorous and exciting as new features - but
we knew we had to do it to keep our promise of making the lives of our
clients easier with our software, not add stress! Specifically:
- Redesigned manual registration of event attendees by admin,
which can now be done for members, past event attendees and new
contacts.
- Administrators can now manually process member renewals.
- Administrators can now manually record donations (e.g. if it was mailed in).
- New members can now retry online payment for membership without administrator involvement.
- We
have also increased file upload limits across the board; enabled
formatting functions for members when entering blog posts, forum topics
and forum replies; allowed using any custom currency (for
offline/manual payments only as online payments are limited by options
offered by the payment processor).
As always, we spent quite a bit of time revising the old code to
keep the system humming as we grow.Alas, this update was one of the
most difficult ones ever. Rushing to get some very frequently requested
changes out the door we tightened the testing time and ended up with a
number of glitches experienced by clients - so we had to release a
number of patches over the last few weeks. Our apologies to everyone
affected. We have learned a painful lesson and adjusted our procedures
- adding extra testing time to prevent this from occurring again.
See more at Release history page
Coming up next:
Our next release is just around the corner - scheduled for April 8th, and in it you will see:
- Major often-requested enhancement: setup member record fields separately for each membership level.
- Customization of membership renewal emails (instead of relying on the standard template).
- We
started working on Integrated credit card payment (to avoid forcing
people to go to PayPal site to pay - instead they will be able to enter
credit card right on our secure payment page). This turned out to be
more complicated than we originally expected and with payment being
such an important function we decided to allocate additional time to
properly finalize and test this. We currently expect to finish all our
testing and make this important change available around the end of May.
- Several new design themes added to the selection.
- Function
'Customize colors and styles' is becoming more user friendly: your
changes will be reflected in the preview pane immediately, you will no
longer have to apply changes to preview them.
- MemberID field is now available on the member profile - and can be searched on.
Another big item on our agenda is an overhaul of our hosting
infrastructure. With our rapid growth of client base we need to stay
ahead of the curve to ensure speedy and reliable performance of Wild
Apricot application. The new servers have been purchased several weeks
ago and we will spend the next 3-4 week carefully testing the new
setup. We expect to move everything to the new servers by the end of
April.
Once we complete the transition to the new servers and all the work
on the new Payment mode, here are some of the biggest enhancements
planned for the next few months:
- Redesign of payment and pending transactions workflow to
align it with common terminology of invoices and payment confirmations,
enable admins and members to re-print documents as needed.
- Email subscriptions to forum updates.
- Ability
to separate which fields on the member information page are accessible
to the public - and which ones to other members only.
- Event discount coupons.
- Horizontal menu options.
- More customization options for look and feel.
- Member levels which are not allowed to log in.
- Member photo-albums.
We appreciate all the ongoing feedback - please keep it coming - and
please be patient with us. We are processing and prioritizing hundreds
of varied requests from our clients and it is a delicate balance to
deliver more capabilities - while avoiding making the system clumsy and
overcomplicated.
Also, we are planning to take another step in making our development
process more transparent: we plan to start publishing a queue of our
top enhancements under consideration so that you can add your comments
- and vote for things which have top priority for you.