Tendenci – The Open Source AMS Blog
Community Blog for Open Source AMS Makers
Your site users can now subscribe to email notifications of your job board updates. This will help your members utilize your online job bank to the max by bringing them all the latest job postings in the areas they are most interested in, right to their inbox.
Users can define how often they want to receive updates, as well as what job categories they want to be notified about. For more information, read this Tendenci help file!
Things are going along just fine and then – BAM – your site admin up and quits. You take over the job and the first order of business is to remove the old admin from the site and add yourself. But where does the admin’s email address show up? The Tendenci HR help files will walk you through adding and removing administrators from your site, as well as show you how to run a periodic listing of all of your site admins. Security is muy importante! Stay on top of it!
Memberships are cool! Have you seen what Tendenci can do to manage Membership status?
You can upload your members from a third party (national) database, then let new members join and pay online. Members receive automatic email notification when their membership nears its expiration 
date with a click to renew their status, update their record and pay online — or print the renewal application to submit with a check or cash.
You can set a grace period during which members retain site access after expiration and run a script that removes all expired memberships from the system. You can also set up multiple membership types at different rates and with different pricing for events and restrict site access, including member lists, to members only.
What an awesome feature!!
The latest Tendenci update brings you richer RSS feeds for your feed consumption pleasure.
What does this mean? When you subscribe to an RSS feed, via a free service like Bloglines, your Tendenci feeds now appear with even more content, clearer headlines and include all of your graphics and photos from your online content!
These changes make your content appear even more professional and enticing to your potential Web site visitors and content readers. Great stuff!
Tendenci sites were updated with minor revisions throughout all modules on April 25, 2006.
The most noteable change is richer RSS feeds with more content and photos.
Thanks,
J
Schipul loves to repeat the ‘Content is King’ mantra. By now you may be tired of hearing it, but it’s true! Fresh content really is important to your search engine ranking and the way your users interact with your site and your organization.
Everyone likes to be able to add content to their site quickly and easily – which is one of the great things about the Tendenci software. However, some users have found that one of the fastest ways to do this is by re-activating OLD content. Not a good thing to do.
Example – An already expired job position comes open again and instead of creating a new job and posting it, an administrator re-activates that original (old) job listing. Don’t let this happen to you!
But why is activating old content on your Tendenci site so bad?:
The moral of the story is to always add new content as new content. Doing so will keep the search engines, your site users and your RSS feeds happy and up-to-date. Happy content adding!
Help is here! The Getting Started with Tendenci tutorial has been added to the Help Files found on the Tendenci web site. Starting with an explanation of what Tendenci is, this tutorial walks new Tendenci users through the basic software modules: Users, Events, Jobs, Articles, Newsletters and Content Management. Simple step-by-step instructions demonstrate how to perform basic tasks within Tendenci and how to easily administer your site content and data.
The tutorial is also chock-full of tips on maximizing your use of the Tendenci software, providing better support to your members, increasing communication with your customers, and turning your site into a revenue center!
This is a great, self-paced way to get your new employees up to speed on Tendenci — or to take a refresher course — without leaving your desk.
Sparklines are one of my favorite additions to Tendenci. Within the "articles search" section of any Tendenci website, you will see a small line graphic that shows the up and down viewing trends of a particular article. Holding your cursor over the graphic will review an "ALT Tag" that shows the highest viewing an article has received since the article was created. (Please refer to the image on the left as an example.)
Edward R. Tufte defines sparklines as: "datawords" – data-intense, design simple, word-sized graphics.
Within a second you can tell if an article is "sporadically viewed", "a growing trend", "steadily viewed", or
"not viewed at all". This also helps to communicate simple interactive relationships. For example, "How much does viewership declines when an article is made member-only view?" I have included an image (click to enlarge) to help demonstrate the effects of an article that requires a "log-in".
The sparkline graphic also includes a "highest reads point (green dot)", a "lowest reads point (blue dot)" and a current position marked by the red dot. The visualization that is produced from the small graphics may help an organization better understand the growing needs of the membership and the hot topics of the day. Thanks to Jenny Qian for her work on integrating sparklines into Tendenci.
The Business Directory search page within Tendenci contains a "tag cloud" listing that helps users visulalize the amount of content within a particular category. Often the value of "weighted text lists" is misunderstood as "a jumble of mixed-sized fonts". Instead the developers of Tendenci see the lists as an easy means of communicating the popularity of content.
Visualization is an important theme in Tendenci. The value of human communication and interaction is weaved through every part, including putting tag clouds on Business Directory listings to help communicate the value of the content.
For more on the theory behind tag clouds, I suggest reviewing these powerpoint slides by Rashmi Sinha. Rashmi put together some slides that help to explain the theories behind tag clouds. Here is also a link to Rashmi’s site: http://www.rashmisinha.com/.
