Release Notes - 10th November 2009

These are the release notes for another round of updates to the Insight platform. As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

Sitemap XML

A Sitemap is a way to tell search engines such as Google about the content on your site. Usually, search engines index your site's content by following links on the site, but not all pages can necessarily be found in this way, and so the Sitemap gives you a way to make sure that the search engines know about all the pages on your site.

In this release we have added a new format to the Menu XML feed (accessible from the Settings tab under 'APIs') which generates XML adhering to the Sitemap protocol. Here's a demonstration of how to setup a sitemap.

You can choose any feed that you have saved using the Sitemap protocol as your default Sitemap, and this will then be available at http://<your_site>/sitemap.xml. You can submit this file to Google using the instructions at Google Webmaster Central. Your default sitemap will also be referenced in the robots.txt file which search engines routinely use to decide which pages on your site to index.

If you want to get your site known about by as many people as possible (and we assume that you do!) then making sure that it is as 'search engine friendly' as possible is vital. Sitemaps are just one of the features that we have added to your armoury for achieving this. In a recent release we added configurable page titles and meta tags to allow you to customise exactly how your page titles and other associated information are indexed, and our system is already using search engine friendly URLs.

New financial reports

The 'Reports' tab in the Web Office gives you access to a wealth of information in different formats about your site and its visitors and about your members.

To help those of you who are using payment groups, we have added some new formats to the 'Payment Assignments' report (accessible from 'Financial Reports' on the 'Reports' tab).

The new assignments reports give you information on:

Delegates - how much revenue is associated with particular delegates.
Delegates and options - how much revenue is associated with the particular option choices for individual delegates.
Discounts - the amount that a given discount has cost you across all registrations.

Within these new reports, where the underlying assignment amount is different from the total cost for a given option / delegate - e.g because a discount has been applied to the delegate, a receivable amount has been amended, or the reciept is a partial payment of the receivable amount - then the assigned amount is pro rata proportional to the option's / delegate's cost.

The new option report contains a number of new columns which show you whether an override was applied to any option amount and the proportion of any discount which applies to this option. This allows you to quickly see the costs of any discounts and overrides that you have applied.

In the payment group itself, on the 'Registrations' tab (which may be shown as Registrations, Subscriptions or Bookings, depending on what sort of payment group you are using) you can also now see the amount associated with a particular option when you are in the option group.

Finally, we've added a new criterion when searching for Registrations in the Query wizard - you can now search for all the Registrations to which you have applied overrides to the amounts using the 'Has Override?' criterion.

More Note Driven Layouts

We got so excited about our Note Driven Layouts development in the last release that we've just gone on adding new features to it.

As of this release, you can now include a Notes component in an Article List mini layout and select an image dynamically from a note. This means that you can bring the note driven layouts functionality into your article lists - for example dynamically specifying a picture of the author of an article.

Other enhancements and bug fixes

When searching for users in the Query wizard, you can now add details of the first two family members to the query results (this is useful, for example, to show details of parents when searching for children).
Global notes can now be entered when creating new users (rather than having to create the user and then come back to add global notes)
Fixed an issue that some users were having viewing the Organisation Profile settings page.
In rare circumstances, where an individual had only signed up to a single slot, signup sheet reminders were not being sent properly. This has now been fixed. (This did not affect rota reminder emails).
Mailings resumed from drafts which had a custom 'From' address were sometimes being sent using the default 'From' address. This has now been fixed.
The 'Site Notes' Settings page is now hidden from the menu users who don't have the necessary permissions (the menu option was previously visible but not selectable).

Insight Support, 10/11/2009