Our next Wild Apricot release is just around the corner — scheduled for early August. Here’s what you can look forward to seeing:
- Authorize.Net payment option. If you have your own merchant account via Authorize.Net payment processor, you can now use it to process credit card payments (instead of PayPal).
- Invoicing for membership applications. As a first step, we've added the following capabilities:
- Automatically generate and email an invoice/payment receipt for membership applications.
- Administrators can view/reprint/resend invoices/receipts.
This is just a first step in a large overhaul we are going through to implement proper invoicing workflows to all transactions. Over the next few releases you will see more invoicing functionality (and in subsequent releases, invoicing will be extended to other transactions).
- Multiple member application pages. For example, you can now create a separate page for sponsor forms, another one for regular membership applications, one more for special discounted applications for students, and so on.
- Forum categories. Each forum can now be assigned to a category and you can create webpages with a list of all or some forums grouped by category.
- Rich-text formatting of introductory texts on functional pages. These used to be plain-text fields — now you can insert pictures and links, format the text, and add HTML and Javascript code.
- Search Engine Optimization tools and Advanced Customization (CSS) have been made available for all paid account plans (previously only available for Community plans and up).
- We have revised large parts of our code and upgraded to a new more powerful database server to maintain and improve system response time as we serve more and more clients.
- We have started work on a Page Management screen that will make it easier for you to organize your website pages — and, most importantly, will allow us to add horizontal menu design and dynamic menu options in the next few months.
- Also, we have been redesigning our HTML code to allow for more design customization flexibility. In this update we have revised a number of pages — blog, forum, etc. This work will continue, and it should be finished in the next update. Then we’ll move on to implement additional design capabilities that these changes enable.
New support portal
Last but not least, we have moved over to a new support system (support.wildapricot.com
).
Discussion forums are still in place, but should be used for non-urgent
matters and general discussion. The new support system will improve
request tracking to ensure that
nothing ever falls “through the cracks” or into junk filters. It also
lets us monitor our response times and support volume on a day-to-day
basis, so we can adjust our support resources as needed to meet your
needs more quickly.
Wild Apricot uptime statistics
We have analyzed server logs and implemented utilities to objectively measure
our system uptime.
Here are the
statistics for March–June, 2008:
|
|
March
|
April
|
May
|
June
|
|
Uptime %
|
99.7060
|
99.5346
|
99.8829
|
99.7516
|
Looking at it from
another angle, here is Wild Apricot's actual downtime for that
period:
|
|
March
|
April
|
May
|
June
|
|
Downtime
(hours:minutes)
|
2:10
|
3:20
|
0:50
|
1:47
|
And we're pleased to
say that pretty much all of this has been planned downtime
that's required for system updates.
Coming up next
We are still in the
early stages of planning for the next release but here's what is
being discussed:
-
Continue
invoicing workflow enhancements — see above;
-
Start
adding functionality for member groups, such as committees;
-
Finish
the page management function and move on to horizontal menu options;
-
Additional
design themes;
-
Human-friendly
URLs
Wild Apricot
Roadmap and Crowdsourcing
We're frequently
asked about Wild Apricot's long-term product roadmap. Our development
philosophy is very much driven by the feedback we are receiving, and
our development procedures (updates every 4–6 weeks) give us the
flexibility to respond quickly to meet
client needs.
We collect client
feedback and reconcile it with our own ideas for the product through
two discussion forums:
Based on how much
feedback each item generates and on how well a particular request is
defined — and reconciling this with other priorities (driven by
system performance, security and overall product vision) — we can
then schedule these items into upcoming releases.
Please keep your
feedback coming! The more specific you can be in terms of things you
need, the better we can collect additional feedback from others and
prioritize each item for action.