2012 - Page 11 of 11 - Tendenci - The Open Source AMS Blog

2012-02-012021-07-02

Schipul is Proud to Sponsor the Space City Classic!

This weekend is the Space City Classic Gymnastic Invitational, held February 3rd-5th at the Legends Sports Complex in Spring. The Classic is hosted by Team Cypress of Cypress Academy of Gymnastics in Houston, TX and a portion of all of the proceeds from the event will go to The Greater Houston Gymnastics Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization. Schipul is proud to sponsor this great event!

The Space City Classic website is built with Tendenci Content Management System Community Edition. The site features include a large homepage rotator, News feed, Event Calendar, and Membership Login Area.

“The Greater Houston Gymnastics Foundation is extremely thankful for the support of Schipul and the Tendenci website platform in helping us revolutionize our presence on the web. Not only does the quality of product improve the reputation of our meets and organization, but the simplicity and intuitive design constructs of Tendenci make web development, enhancement and daily use extremely attractive. The fact that I didn’t have to train users on how to interface with our operations through the website says enough!”

– David Duren, The Space City Classic

TheSpaceCityClassic.com hosted on Tendenci. Learn more and sign up for a free trial at Tendenci.com

2012-01-272014-11-02

Tendenci Software Updates and New Features | January 26th, 2012

Coming Soon to a Tendenci Website Near You…

…Anyone Can Register Anyone with Tendenci’s Event Registration Upgrade!

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.

How it will work:

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.

Enjoy!

Here is the full list of updates we will be unleashing this week on your Tendenci software for association website management:

Global Settings and Content Management

Updated several status message styles across modules, making alerts and status notices easier to see and understand. Some of the places you’ll notice these changes on your website include:
- Tendenci impersonation status
- When you add, edit or delete Pages, Articles, and News
- When you add, edit or delete Events
- Membership Applications and Member profiles
Improved the foreign language translation capabilities of Tendenci Stories Module and User Profiles
Added new tracking features to give you better information on your site users’ activities on the website, including:
- New tracking of how many times .PDFs and other non-image files are downloaded or viewed
- New tracking of how site visitors are using the different modules on your website and where they are visiting the most
- You can now view a registered user’s site activity individually from each user’s profile
- *Reports for this newly tracked data are coming soon
Added a “Print Page” option to the stories module

Membership Module Updates

When a Member renews and changes their Membership type, Tendenci will automatically stop sending Membership Notices meant exclusively for their previous Membership Type
Expanded Membership Search functionality and now you can search any entry field to find search results
Membership status messages have been expanded to display expired members and if the expired membership has passed renewal or is still inside the renewal period in addition to displaying active membership status. You can easily view these on each member profile page

Tendenci Template and Design Updates

Newly created sites now have a “click-and-edit” feature for changing your logo
Improved the modal boxes styles to increase user accessibility when adding or changing Template content with Tendenci Spaces
Improved navigation style updates in the module pages
Updating how new style changes are implemented to reduce the need for registered site users to refresh and clear their web browsers cache

Tendenci Events Management Module

New Event Type Color! We have added a new light blue color to the Events Module
Added “Email Address” or “Member ID” validation functionality to the Event Registration

Tendenci Directory Module

Updated the Directory Price page to make it easier to use
Updated the directory pricing page to feature “add/edit” options when appropriate.

Tendenci Plugins

Updated Drag and Drop menu for managing online video galleries and videos

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!

2012-01-202013-06-10

Tendenci Updates January 19th, 2012

Maintenance Announcement | Planned Website Outage to Upgrade Your Tendenci Database

Sunday January 22nd, 2011 Between 1:00AM and 2:00AM CST:

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.

Check out all of our awesome updates this week on your Tendenci software for association website management!

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!

Global Settings and Content Management

Searches using the Global Search or File Search now include results from PDF documents stored on your website
The Directory “Add” link is now visible by anyone with a login account on your website
You now have the option to preset tags when adding a story via query string
Updated the stories search page to be translation compatible

Custom Forms Module Updates

Increased Custom Form titles from 50 characters to now allow 100 characters for titles

Membership Module Updates

You can now paginate through subscribers on the group page
Graceful degrading when associating a subscriber with an existing account during import.

Physical Locations Module Added to Tendenci 5.0!

Tendenci 5.0 now has the physical locations module
Site visitors can search your locations by distance located at, all locations, or nearest location
Find the “location” application on your Tendenci admin bar to add, edit, and manage your physical locations
When a location is added or edited, the latitude and longitude are auto-saved

Tendenci Template and Design Updates

All new Tendenci sites now include a default custom contact form
Updated styles for Tendenci tabs
Created Modal style updates for spaces and logo edit forms

Tendenci Email Newsletter Marketing Dashboard

Your Campaign Monitor subscriber lists now automatically sync when subscribers are imported into a group

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!

2012-01-192013-06-10

New Tabs in Tendenci thanks to Bootstrap

With all of the recent focus on protecting the open web, it’s been great to read some of the stories that really show people’s passion for the internet community. Here is a recent story from us on how we created a new feature for our users.

The Tendenci Tabs

Tendenci modules have tabs. In past and current versions of the software we have used a tabbed navigation system for our modules with exposed module and contextual links mixed together. Let me give an example.

When viewing an Article as a site administrator, you will see links that relate to all articles, such as:

Search
Settings
Add an Article

These links are great and are useful anywhere in the Articles module. You will also see these links:

View Article
Edit Article
Delete Article

The links in the second group relate just to the article we are viewing. In some cases, the separation between these two sets of links is obvious. However, in more complex modules like Event registration and Membership management, these links can really start to add up. See the image below for a real world example:

We have been on the hunt for a solution to this problem for some time and were fortunate to stumble upon a perfect solution earlier this week.

A few days ago our team came across an article about Bootstrap on A List Apart. In it, author Mark Otto of Twitter describes the process of creating Bootstrap, an “open-source front-end toolkit” made with the goal of helping designers/developers build good stuff fast. While I’ve always been a sucker for the newest and the flashiest in web tech, Bootstrap had much more going for it. It is cross-browser tested so it will work for the broad majority of people. It’s written with LESS, a programmer-friendly way of writing and compiling CSS. Best of all, it’s freely available to use.

The New Tendenci Tabs

There are several parts of Bootstrap that we like, and one of the key features we are now using in Tendenci 5 is the tabs. The tab design from Bootstrap allow us to tuck all of our module links into a drop down, and with a little programming from our side, we can create columns and grouping for much better organization. We’ve chosen to split these two groups of links into two columns, each labelled, with the goal of making it easier to find the links to the functionality you want.

We outlined this goal and sketched out some ways of implementing this into the software. We began the work on Wednesday the 18th and were able to complete it in less than 24 hours and in time for our weekly release. We think the tabs have a much more modern, clean look that will go well next to more modern site designs. We are excited about the aesthetic changes, but the new functionality for the tab links is the real shining point here.

Without toolkits like Bootstrap, we would never have been able to implement a solution in such little time. Without a free and open web, companies like Twitter may not be able to gain enough success to be able to release tools like these. Companies like Github are relied on by people like us making software to be used on the web. It’s great tools like these that help us rapidly develop new features and updates for Tendenci.

We are very excited to announce our new tabs, and we give a big thanks to Bootstrap. They should be rolling out to a Tendenci 5 site near you soon.

2012-01-16

Some WordPress & Drupal Sites Experiencing Intermittent Outages – Sites Are Being Upgraded

One of our servers is experiencing intermittent outages due to overload issues. This affects some of our WordPress & Drupal websites.

When attempting to access sites on this server, you may encounter “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” errors. For the most part, you will see no issues with the site – but we know that any down time can be frustrating. We apologize for the inconvenience to our clients and their site visitors.

This is one of our older servers; we are upgrading all of the affected sites to a newer server one at a time. We are starting this process immediately, but it may take up to two weeks to migrate every site.

Thank you for your patience, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our Support Team at (281) 497-6567 ext 411 or support@tendenci.com.

We will be following up with each affected client directly as well.

2012-01-142013-06-10

Tendenci Updates January 12th, 2012

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!

Global Settings and Content Management

Added Payment Method as a Field Label on custom forms.
Added Two new search filters for user profile search, allowing administrators to search users to view all users with a specific level of permissions and view all users capped at a specific level of permissions.
Updated some of the base template code to prevent page display errors when admins forget to upload media to custom page templates.

Membership Module Updates

Updated the corporate membership module to allow more design option in custom template designs for corporate memberships.
Updated membership entry approval email that goes to administrators with more links to the membership applicant data.
Added more information on corporate membership renewal notification.
Improved credit card payment verification process for corporate memberships.
All memberships now require a membership type at the database level to ensure content validity.
Moved the Corporate Memberships Tendenci Navigation Tab to the Membership Entry Application Page, replacing the News Tab.
Administrators will now see the Total Number of Memberships when they search Membership Entries.
Added a balance to membership entries, which links to the member’s invoice. This will help administrators better manage their association’s finances and account receivables.

Career Management Module Updates

Updated the Jobs Module to prevent duplicate URL slugs from new job postings that are very similar to previous job postings.
Improved indexing for the Jobs Module to increase relevancy of Job Board search results.
Add two new search filters for jobs search to allow you to search job postings by their Category and Subcategory.

Tendenci Self Sign-Up Trial Updates

Added a new email notification that will send trial/self sign-up customers an email notification 1 week prior to their trial expiration period to inform them their trial period is ending.
Currently – trial/self sign-up customers will not have their site disabled when their 30-day trial is over. We will receive a notice and send them an email the day their site has expired and will update them when the Beta testing has ended at least 2 weeks before we would disable their trial website.

Tendenci Email Newsletter Marketing Dashboard

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!

2012-01-062014-11-02

Tendenci Updates January 6th 2011

Check out all the goodies we built into this week’s Tendenci updates just for you:

Global Settings and Content Management

You can now copy custom Forms
Forms that subscribe users to groups now require an email address
Clicking the “Help files” link on the admin bar underneath the Content section now takes admins to the more accessible interface than site users see

Membership Module Updates

Memberships no longer require an application to create
Administrators can now upgrade a user to a member from the user’s profile page by simply selecting the appropriate membership type.
You can now add company representatives to a corporate membership faster with an auto-completion option
Administrators can now use custom email addresses in the new “Sender” field added to Membership notices

Photo and Video Modules Updates

Administrators can now choose to download entire photo album sets as zip files in addition to downloading individual photos

Social Media Integration

Tendenci Content Module data, including Events, Memberships, Jobs, Directories, and others, can now be automatically imported to custom designed Facebook Page tabs.

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!

2012-01-032014-11-02

Kick off your New Year with some free web marketing advice!

It’s the start of a brand new year, and that clean slate has likely got you thinking about goals and projects you want to tackle for your business. Maybe you’re wanting to take on a redesign of your website, or get started with social media to build online community. Maybe you’ve had all these online outposts for the past year but don’t feel you’re getting the most benefit from them. You’ve got questions but aren’t really sure where to go for the answers. Maybe you Googled something along those lines and ended up here. 🙂

Well, for those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, we’ve got a treat for you! Remember back in college when you were totally stumped on that assignment you were given and needed a little extra help? You’d head to the TA’s or professor’s office during office hours and get the individual attention you needed. It was great! Wouldn’t it be great if there were office hours for all your web marketing questions? Yea, we thought so too.

Schipul’ The Web Marketing Company is pleased to kick off the New Year by featuring Office Hours for those in the Bay Area who may be looking for a little free web marketing advice. Our Silicon Valley office director, April Kyle, will be holding office hours every Wednesday this month’ so sign up now! Topics can include anything you have questions about’ non-profit management, association management, web design, event registration services, Drupal, WordPress’ you name it. We want to be clear – this is 100% NOT a sales pitch. This is us at Schipul wanting to meet you, get to know you, and share with you the combined knowledge of 14 years of geeking out playing around on the web. We believe in knowledge sharing so much, it’s officially part of our culture.

There is so much awesomeness on the web these days’ let’s chat about it! Sign up now and bring your burning web questions to us. We can’t wait to meet you!

2012-01-022014-11-02

2012 New Year’s Resolutions Your Website Wants You to Make

Your Organization’s Online Brand relies on providing a positive, interactive experience for your customers on your website. Your website needs to be timely, relevant, engaging and easy to find and navigate to meet the needs of your customers and members. This year, make a resolution to give your website a little more love and your website and your customers will thank you.

Here are our top New Year’s Web Resolutions for you to create a great online customer experience and grow your brand in 2012.

1. Optimize for Mobile

Mobile search and web browsing is going to be critical to being found on the web. It is estimated that nearly 36% of the U.S. now owns a mobile device and more than 80% of of small business owners are smartphone owners as well.

What this means to you is that there is a very good chance your site visitors are using a mobile device to search for and browse your website. Pull out your smartphone or iPad and go to your website. Spend some time trying to access different articles and content from your mobile and think about how this experience compares to the traditional experience from a typical desktop PC. If you are frustrated from the experience – imagine how your site visitors feel.

Now, search Google using one of your keyword phrases from a mobile device and see where you rank. Over the next few months, even high-ranking websites may see a rank decrease from mobile searches if they haven’t enabled user agent-detection for specific devices. Google just introduced Googlebot-Mobile, a new search engine crawler that specifically looks for mobile type CSS that triggers a mobile stylesheet custom for individual users’ devices. Someone browsing the web from their iPad is going to have a different experience than someone from their Android smartphone. Google ranks mobile websites based on factors such as usability, speed, features, and overall performance.

Get started with this web-resolution and register and attend our Free 2012 Search Engine Marketing New Year’s Checklist webinar this Thursday to learn how to optimize your website for mobile search in the New Year.

2. Don’t Forget About the Technical Stuff

As the internet has become more widely adopted by the general public, websites have become easier to set-up and maintain with less technical know-how required. There are some technical truths that still hold true and taking the time to understand these facts of the web this year will help you improve your customers’ online experience.

There’s no such thing as an “Out-of-the-Box” website. All websites require customization like naming menu buttons, adding a logo and graphics, changing the color scheme to match your organization’s branding, and adding content that tells visitors who you are and what you do. All of this takes time and is an ongoing process even after your website is launched live. Your website will look very different day-to-day from the initial set-up to “Go-Live” day.

Where you host your website does matter. Your website requires a host that stores your content, CMS software, and other data on enterprise-level computer hardware (servers and hard disk arrays) connected to the internet with high capacity bandwidth making your website accessible online to anyone who visits your website url. Nowadays, this typically means a cloud environment like Amazon Web Services which offers security, expandable storage and bandwidth when your site experiences unexpected spikes in traffic, and a dedicated IT staff available 24/7 to maintain, update, and repair the infrastructure hosting your website.

Learn more about the Cloud in this great video from SchipulCon 2011 and learn more about website CMS platforms in our free upcoming webinar “How to Select the Best Website CMS for Your Organization’s Website.”

3. Improve What’s Inside Your Website – Content!

You have a beautifully designed website that takes visitors’ breath away when they stop by – but have you focused on developing and implementing a content strategy that communicates to your visitors who you are and what you do once their breath returns?

Great content is relevant to your visitors and is also what attracts search engine crawlers to boost your website’s search rankings. Content isn’t limited to just text anymore either. Add photos from recent events, upload digital training and product videos, and integrate your social media accounts with your website to give your website visitors a full view into your organization’s online brand.

January is the perfect time to go through your website and review existing articles, news releases, and other content and make sure your latest press releases isn’t from 1996. Look at your website through the eyes of your visitors and think about what is not being communicated about your organization that should be and make a list of these items. Tip: Create a weekly schedule to write new content on these topics in 2012 and you’ll see an increase in your site traffic as well as your search engine rankings.

Learn more great ways to improve your website’s 2012 Content Strategy on the SEM blog and register and attend our Free upcoming webinar “Writing for the Web” to improve your website’s content this year.

Tools for Successfully Keeping Your Web-Resolutions

Here are a few more tools and resources we’ve put together to help you succeed:

Send us your questions and come hang out with us at our Houston Headquarters or Silicon Valley, California office!