There is a new Ubuntu LTS release. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ‘Trusty Tahr’ transitions to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) today on April 30th, 2019. Tendenci is now on Ubuntu 18.04.
Every Tendenci product has a lifecycle as well. Read more here.
Tendenci – The Open Source AMS Blog
Community Blog for Open Source AMS Makers
Yesterday, I watched with great interest the Apple announcements coming out of Cupertino regarding the latest products such as the iPhone 6. And, as an almost ‘afterthought’, they brought out the iWatch, a wearable device that goes with you anywhere.
This reinforces the notion that the “Internet of Everything” offers anything, anywhere, anytime, to anyone, and presents some challenges to the IT community – how can we provide content and services to anyone, anywhere, anytime, while at the same time ensure that this data is updated, patched, backed up, secured, and protected from disasters, data loss and corruption? It’s sort-of like trying to pave and re-pave an interstate highway while people are driving on it all-day and all-night.
Here at Tendenci, one of the hindrances to providing site availability 24×7 was literally the hardware these sites were running on. The servers, hard-drives, power supplies, cables, switches, routers, power-distribution networks, even having them all in the same building meant that, if the building lost power, the sites would be down.
So, we began looking for the most effective ways to solve this problem. Rather than re-invent an entire infrastructure to protect us from failure, why not utilize services from someone who has already solved the problem? Hello Amazon Web Services.
Recently, Gartner published a report on Cloud-based services and rated Amazon’s portfolio as “Highly Innovative, agile, and responsive to customer needs”.
(the full report is here)
By farming out the hardware to Amazon’s distributed architecture, it has allowed us to focus on more important pieces of the equation – new features and innovation, new technologies and subsystems that streamline performance and capacity, and customer enhancement requests we have received from the community.
As the next version of our product design looms on the horizon, it brings with it all of the heart and soul that open-source community provides. Watch for some very cool innovative ideas in this space soon!
Scott Pederson
5:30 PM
All sites are back online. If you continue to see errors or have any questions at all, please let us know!
Questions? Contact us at support@tendenci.com or (281) 497-6567 ext 411
2:30 PM
Some sites are beginning to come back online as we continue to work through the server issue. You should begin to see these Tendenci 4 sites back online.
9:30 AM
This morning, one of our Tendenci 4 Servers is experiencing an outage and some Tendenci 4 sites are down.
Our team is actively working on the issue to get the sites back up as soon as possible.
We apologize for the inconvenience and will update here with more information as soon as we can.
Questions? Contact us at support@tendenci.com or (281) 497-6567 ext 411
UPDATE 1/22/2013 7:15 PM – All sites should be now functioning with a normal load time. Timeouts have ceased and the firewall will now allow FTP connections and allow payment gateways to post to Tendenci. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. We will continue to monitor server connections. Thank you.
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UPDATE 1/22/2013 5:30 PM – We are still working on this issue with our service provider this evening. Some clients are reporting issues with the email server as well on Tendenci 4 sites. This means that email sent from the website (such as password resets) may be delayed. We will update with more information as we have it.
Thank you again for your patience, we apologize for the inconvenience.
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Our Tendenci 4 servers are currently experiencing a heavy increase of traffic, which has limited our connections to T4 sites. Your data is NOT at risk. This does not effect visitor’s ability to access your website or admin’s ability to log in. It does effect FTP connections (FTP connections may time out) and merchant account connections.
We are working on the issue and will update here as we have more information.
Any payment gateway that is posting back to Tendenci 4 may be interrupted. Payments are being processed normally at the Merchant Account (i.e Authorize.net), but for some clients the approval confirmation is timing out before it is reported back to Tendenci.
If this happens, you will get an Error Message that payment was approved but there was an error in reporting the transaction back to the website.
Below is a sample timeout Error Message from Authorize.net:
If you get this error or reports from your customers of this error, please contact our support team and we walk you through how to verify the payment was processed correctly and update your invoices in Tendenci.
Questions? Contact our support team support@tendenci.com or (281) 497-6567 ext 411
We are working on the issue and will update you as soon as we can. Thank you for your patience.
Between the hours of noon and five yesterday afternoon, one of our mail servers went down and was not relaying email from some Tendenci 4.1 and Tendenci 5.0 websites. We have updated the effected sites to point to a new server and all notices should now be sending properly.
The mail server effects email notices sent through the website. For Tendenci 4 Clients, the mail server also effects newsletter sends. If you queued a T4 newsletter to be sent yesterday, it remained in the queue and was sent yesterday evening.
We apologize for the inconvenience. Below are instructions on how to review the email notices generated from your website:
You can review the notices created from your Tendenci website following these steps.
Be sure you are logged in as a superuser and hover over Quick Links to choose “Admin Backend”
Scroll down to the Notifications box and click “Notice emails”
Or you can navigate to this page directly using the URL: yourURL.com/admin/notifications/noticeemail/
This will display a list of all of the email notices your site should have sent. Look for any notices dated yesterday (January 2, 2012) and click the name of the notice to read the contents.
In Tendenci 4 there are a few reports that log activity that should have resulted in an email notification. Review the following links to make sure you didn’t miss anything yesterday:
Contacts Report Displays Contact Form Submissions by Day
The most common email notification you will receive is when someone submits your Contact form. To review your site’s Contacts Report – from the Dashboard, click “Reports” under the Tendenci tabs. It will be listed as the first report.
Or navigate directly to yoursiteURL.com/en/users/reports/contacts.asp
Look for contact forms that came in January 2. Each block represents a contact form, click on the block to view the user’s information and contact form notes.
Other Tendenci 4 Email Notification Reports:
We apologize for the inconvenience, and are happy to help answer any questions you have.
Contact us at support@tendenci.com or (281) 497-6567 ext 411
Coming in 2013: We’re updating several features in the administration dashboard to give you easier control over your site’s advanced management tools.
When we rewrote Tendenci in Python and Django in order to release an open source version, we also updated the Administration Management Dashboard that we commonly will refer to as your “Admin Backend”. The Admin Backend is intended for Tendenci Super-Users to manage the more advanced site and user functions, as well as give our open source users quick access to developer and theme documentation and tools.
Until now, most users have probably never seen this part of your site, and because we’re going to be adding tons of pretty awesome new features to your Admin Backend this year – I thought I’d offer y’all a tour.
If you have any questions or comments after the tour, please post in our comments section below or email me.
You can easily navigate to your site’s Admin backend two ways:
** You’ll need to have Super-User level access to the Tendenci website in order to access the Admin Backend regions.
Here’s a screenshot the site Administration Dashboard Homepage that you’ll see when you first log into the admin backed. You’ll see the full list of modules under Site Administration installed on your site. If you install any plugins, such as the staff or videos plugins, you’ll find those listed here as well.
The Admin Backend dashboard also shows you your “Recent Actions” where you can see recent items you’ve added (marked with a green plus icon), and edited, (marked with a pencil icon). The actions are linked to the content enabling you to quickly access the most recent content you’ve been working on.
If you click through to one of the modules, for example the Files module, you’ll find the batch organization tools to make it faster for you to update, add, delete, and manage your site’s content and users. The batch organization tools give you the ability to effect multiple files at once.
Here’s a preview of some of the new batch management features we’re adding:
Click to filter and view Contributors and Owners of Files, Pages, Articles and Other Site Content
Filter content and files by the creator of the item on your site with a single click. The updated Filters let you see which users have added content as well as filter by active or inactive files.
You might use this if you’re trying to find the original content for something that a former Staff member or Volunteer had created. You can even combine the filter by owner with the active filter option to see all content that’s currently active or inactive.
Inline Batch Editing for Titles, Tags, and other Fields
With the new inline editing option, you can quickly edit certain fields like we’re showing here for the stories module. Without having to click and wait for the full edit page to load – you can update tags, titles, categories and other fields just by clicking in the field, typing your changes and pressing enter or clicking out of the box.
Use the drag and drop re-ordering feature to rearrange the order of content inside your admin backend. This is really great for content such as stories, photos, and video galleries where you may want the content to display to users in a different order than you originally uploaded the content in.
For example, when we initially uploaded a series of Membership videos to the website, the videos were displaying out of the series’ order on the video gallery page. By going to the Admin Backend “Videos” dashboard, we were able to drag and drop the videos into the right order, and display the Membership Module 9 Video Series in order from start to finish:
Advanced Sorting Options
The new sorting options will enable you to quickly sort a module’s files using one or more of the header Fields. You can select which header fields to include in the sort and rank them in order for sorting.
For example, let’s say that you’re reviewing content on your website to make sure everything’s up-to-date for the new year. Using the advanced sorting options, you can search your Articles by the last date they were updated so that the most recently updated articles showed up first or last. You can also select to filter out inactive and pending articles by clicking the “active” filter. This way, you can easily start sorting content by starting with content that you know is publicly visible.
As you update content, the “Last Updated” date will change, automatically creating a way for you to keep track of your content that’s been recently edited and see at a glance what content is out of date.
Advanced Site Documentation from Docutils
We also integrated Tendenci with Docutils, an open source document management tool. New Tendenci sites automatically will include advanced documentation and resources for those of you working on Tendenci as a developer or designer and you’ll access these tools from your Admin Backend dashboard.
Our developers have packaged up helpful code snippets, in-depth information about Models and Views, and more!
We’re celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas with daily previews of the all new Tendenci Features coming to your association website in 2013! Join us each day to “open new gifts” filled with feature updates for your website! Visit our Twelve Days of Christmas Main Page to find new gifts for each day from now until January 5th!
We love to hear your questions and comments about Tendenci, the open source CMS for Association’s – leave a reply below in our comments section or send us your thoughts via email to support@tendenci.com.
We’ve updated the event registration system with new features that will go live in all Tendenci websites later this week.
Once the new system is implemented, Tendenci site admins will be able to enable event registration for anyone by anyone else when registering for one of your events. This includes registering someone who qualifies for a discount.
You and your members will be able to use this new feature to register your friends and professional associates for events for them and pay the correct discounted price they are eligible for. You won’t have to share login information and passwords or miss out on event registrations because someone wanted to register but didn’t have time or forgot.
As an attendee who is not logged in: you click the register button, select one of the available prices and submit your registration. You can repeat the second step as many times as permitted [by the event] to include more people.
In order to qualify for discounted pricing, you’ll be asked to submit your email address or member number. You can register using a discounted price if the email address or member number submitted is eligible. You can also repeat this step as many times as permitted.
If an email address is associated with a discounted price, that email address can only be used once to register. If the email address is not associated with a discounted price, the email address can be used repeatedly. This will prevent someone from using the same email address for a member to register their non-member friends just to get the discounted price.
Not using Tendenci for your website CMS?
Find out all the awesome things Tendenci can do for your Association with our 30-Day FREE Trial. Then – show us what you can do with your Tendenci website!
Questions about these Updates?
Hit us up in the comments or over on Get Satisfaction and try out our newest self sign-up version of the Tendenci Software FREE for 30 days!
Some Tendenci Sites will experience a 10 to 15min downtime early this Sunday morning while we upgrade Tendenci 5.0 MySQL Database on client websites. Please contact us at support@tendenci.com if you have any questions.
This update is so big that you might have to clear and refresh your web browser before you can see the changes on your Tendenci website. We’ve got a great help file from the Schipul website on how to clear your web browser for you: https://www.tendenci.com/help-files/how-clear-or-bypass-your-browser-cache-5-seconds/.
Our biggest update this week is our addition of the physical location application – enabling your site visitors to search for the nearest physical location of your organization on your website!
Click Here to learn how to improve your email marketing using Tendenci’s Newsletter Marketing Dashboard integrated with Campaign Monitor’s email marketing software and find other resources for email marketing success!
Not using Tendenci for your website CMS?
Find out all the awesome things Tendenci can do for your Association with our 30-Day FREE Trial. Then – show us what you can do with your Tendenci website!
Questions about these Updates?
Hit us up in the comments or over on Get Satisfaction and try out our newest self sign-up version of the Tendenci Software FREE for 30 days!
We made some new updates to our Tendenci software for association website management this week.
Check out all the awesome things Tendenci can do for your Association with our 30-Day FREE Trial. Then – show us what you can do with your Tendenci website!
Click Here to learn how to improve your email marketing using Tendenci’s Newsletter Marketing Dashboard integrated with Campaign Monitor’s email marketing software and find other resources for email marketing success!
Hit us up in the comments or over on Get Satisfaction and try out our newest self sign-up version of the Tendenci Software FREE for 30 days!
Check out all the goodies we built into this week’s Tendenci updates just for you:
Questions about these updates? Hit us up in the comments or over on Get Satisfaction and try out our newest self sign-up version of the Tendenci Software FREE for 30 days!