Upcoming Webinars and In-house Classes for Tendenci training

Calendar
Have you been to Tendenci training
lately?  It’s fun, it’s free and can really help with the success of
your Web site!  Plus you get to meet Schipul-ites in person and
interact with other Tendenci users.

We have 6 really great classes for you to attend over the next six weeks:

  1. Thursday (3/6): Intro to Tendenci
  2. Wednesday (3/12):  Content Management Using Tendenci (Please note – Online Webinar)
  3. Thursday (03/13): Tendenci Newsletter Training
  4. Thursday (03/20): Content Management Using Tendenci
  5. Wednesday (04/01): Tendenci Newsletter Training (Please note – Online Webinar)
  6. Thursday (04/02): Intro to Tendenci

You can also take a look at the rest of our training classes by visiting our Schipul education calendar here.

Corporate Membership Module Added Renewal Process and Renewal Reminder

Corporatememberships40x40
We have recently rolled out the corporate membership renewal process and renewal reminder. Although they are the basic functionalities in the corporate memberships module, for some reason, they didn’t get included in the initial release. For those who were waiting for this process, we greatly thank you for your patience!

The corporate membership renewal process let you renew your corporate membership as well as the individual memberships under the corporate membership provided that the individual membership type is tied to the corporate membership. For more information on how to renew your corporate membership as an admin and as a dues rep, visit the help files How do I renew a Corporate Membership as an Admin? and How do I renew a Corporate Membership as a Dues Rep?

The renewal reminder will be sent to the dues representative certain days before or after the expiration date. The default setting is 7 days before the expiration date. To turn on or off the renewal reminder, and change its frequency on your site, simply go to http://www.yourdomain.com/en/corporatememberships/ and you’ll find the links to do so. Certainly you must be a site admin.

Newsletter Images Are Now Displaying Properly

What happened?

The software update to help make our email compliant, caused a slight change in the way newsletters were created. This required one extra step to make all paths to your images absolute paths instead of relative paths.

If you have experienced trouble with your Newsletter images displaying this week, The programming team has fixed this for you. Yay! Thank you Programmers!

What did the Programming Team do?

A snippet of code has been added that will automatically turn your relative image paths into absolute image paths for you. This change is automatic so your Tendenci Newsletter images will now display properly in preview mode and in your inbox. The code was accidentally overlooked on the first update, so we apologize for any inconvenience that it may have caused.

What is the difference between the paths?

A relative path is a path to an image or a page that does not include your full website address. You will use relative paths when you are linking to images or pages that live within your Tendenci site. This is an example of a relative path to an image:

Relativepath_4

An absolute path is a path to an image or a page that does include your full web address. You will use an absolute path when you are linking to images or pages outside of your Tendenci site. This is an example of an absolute path to the same image:

  Absolutepath_2

For more information on uploading images and creating newsletters, please visit our Tendenci help files.

Tendenci Enhancements Help Newsletters Reach More End Users

The Tendenci team works hard to keep your Web marketing efforts successful and effective.  In a recent effort to combat SPAM, we have implemented some changes in the way your Web site sends your emails, newsletters and notifications.

These changes not only make your site’s email compliant with Internet rules and regulations of email delivery, but also increase your site’s email deliverability.

When an Email notification, Contact Form Submission or Newsletter is sent from your Tendenci site, it will now have a sender address of DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net. This email address matches the address of the mail server that is being used to process and send your emails – which looks more legitimate to other mail servers, resulting in increased deliveries.

What are you talking about?

Old Way:
To a server, the following sample email header could look like Spam as it is sent with the sender’s own email address from a Tendenci site’s newsletter generator (@hotmail.com vs. @schipul.net):

Return-Path: mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com
Sender: mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com
From: "Mary Dinkleplotz" <mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com>
Subject: My organization’s newsletter!

New and Improved Way:
By changing the ‘Sender’ path, your email will appear less suspicious as the sender address matches your Tendenci site’s mail server that is being used to send the email (@schipul.net):

Return-Path: DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net
Sender: DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net
From: "Mary Dinkleplotz" <mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com>
Subject: My Organization’s Newsletter

How does this affect me?

If I were sending a newsletter to you from the Tendenci website, you would receive my Newsletter in your inbox and the "Sender" would be DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net (this is generally not displayed by the email application).

The "From and/or Reply To” address will continue to have the email address of the user who was specified in the ReplyTo field pictured below:

Newsletterrecipient2

You must be sure to include your correct address in the ‘ReplyTo’ field
(see below) to ensure email replies are sent to your email address.
Otherwise, they will be sent to the DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net
and will not make it to your inbox, which would be sad.

The Good News:

This mandatory update was made specifically to help improve your email deliverability.  It also makes your email compliant with regulations outlined here: http://www.openspf.org/Best_Practices/Webgenerated

Please Note!:

With this change, some of the Tendenci Newsletter bounce back features will be temporarily disabled. This means you will not be receiving your newsletter bounce backs until further notice.

Many Tendenci clients count on receiving their bouncebacks to remove or update email addresses on their mailing lists. We are aware that this temporary disruption may be a challenge for you, so we can offer a solution for you.

By editing your Site Variables, you can revert to the old email sender Return-Path, instead of utilizing the new, compliant sender email address. To make this change, you will need to edit the variable called:  SiteEmailNoReplyAddress

We strongly recommend that you do not change this variable as YOUR
EMAIL DELIVERY RATES WILL DROP IF YOU REVERT BACK!

If you are still not sure if you like the change, this quote from Ed Schipul pretty much sums it all up:"Yes – it IS less convenient. But spammers make everything hell so we need to do this." – Ed Schipul, CEO

What Captcha?

Happy holidays Tendenci users! Before the new year begins we would like you to hear about an update on form captcha. Captcha is an image with a special code in it that appears on web forms in Tendenci and is used to prevent spam. It looks like this:

Captcha

It can be very pesky to fill out for administrators and users so we have changed it to only show for anonymous users. This update will go live soon so keep those eyelids peeled.

Have a wonderful holiday and a happy new year!

Tendenci Membership Reports Update

We have updated a couple of membership reports recently. Not only do they
have the new look and feel now, they also include the total active
members. Under the Member Trends on the membership console page, click on Active Members YTD and Active Members YTD by Type, it will bring you to the updated reports. Certainly you have to be an admin to do so.

Mem_console_3

The active members YTD gives you a good visual of the trend of your membership growth at a glance.

Memytd_3

You can also exclude the total active members and take a close look at the new members and renewing
members.

Nrmemytd_2

This update can be found in the tendenci help file: How Can I View Members Over Time by Month?

Tendenci Software Updates!

Testimonials Updates
Testimonials
Our wonderful programmer Eloy has given the testimonials search a face lift! It now uses styling to present your testimonials.
Directories Updates
Directories
You may now put directories within multiple categories. Yippee! This is easily controlled by a site variable, so if you don’t need it you can always use the old way.
Zip Codes Updates
Zip Codes
You can now control the new zip codes search to tailor to your needs. Need to specify which locations of your establishment show up when a zip code is searched? Well now you can with a new site variable! You may also specify the radius of the search with a site variable.

Photos
The "Next" and "Previous" buttons when flipping though a photo album now start from the first image and move to the last. Don’t want to use those buttons? You can always just click the photo and it will move you to the next image.

Designing newsletters for Outlook 2007

Tendencioutlook2007_newsletter_shad
Have you played around with Outlook 2007 yet?  There are some great features, but also a few changes that make a big difference in how your email works.

Our Creative Director Tim Newton came up with some helpful tips and tricks for designing a newsletter to play friendly in Outlook 2007.  You can read the entire Help File here with great visuals and explanations, but read on for the short and sweet version:

  1. Design your layout without any background colors or images – but creative with border or backgrounds that blend into the layout! (see the newsletter image to the left as an example)
  2. You can use a tiled background in Outlook 2007, but must put it into the body tag and specify the image path like this:

    <style type="text/css" media="screen">
        body {
            margin: 0px;
            padding: 0px;
            color: #666;
            background: #5a200e url("http://www.creativeleak.com/images/nl1/bg_Tile.gif")  } 
    </style>

  3. Background colors can be used in a table or a div, but only if there’s not another table or div inside of it.
  4. Try adding these elements to your email designs but remember, the key to any good looking design is what the content looks like

Too busy to design an Outlook 2007-friendly newsletter?  Contact us today and let us know what our awesome design team can create for your organization!

User identities to show Online Social Connections

Did you know that from your Tendenci user profile you can add user identities to identify areas of social networks you are connected to?  Encourage your Tendenci users/members to add their identities to display social networks.  This is a great way to see who is socially connected to sites like Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, Digg etc.

After have you added your user identities, there will be a visual display of icons on your user profile of identities you have added and are connected to.

I am pushing to integrate blog identities here also. Check back soon.

User_profile_3