Release Notes - 21st January 2010

In the first full release of 2010 we bring you the long-awaited iCal support for the calendar and a host of other updates to the Insight platform. As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

iCal support in the Calendar

One of the most asked-for features in Insight has arrived! We have added an iCal (iCalendar) feed to the Calendar which allows you to integrate your Insight calendar with Google Calendar, Outlook 2007, your iPhone and many other applications. Just click the "ICAL" button above the monthly calendar to obtain the feed URL.

We have put together an iCal guide explaining how to get your personal iCal feed and add it to some commonly used calendar applications.

Email a user from their user record

Another simple feature that we've often been asked for - we've added a task to the bottom of the user record that allows you to email that user directly. This saves you going through the Mailing Wizard or copying and pasting the email address into your mail client.

Note that currently this email comes by default from the site email address (not your personal address), though you can change this for individual emails.

Canonical URLs

A web site is useless if no-one can find it, and we know that search engine rankings are vital for many of you - and so we're always looking for ways to help you get your sites ranked higher.

One of the problems that all sites face is that a single page on the site may be accessible from a variety of URLs because of variations in query string parameters, search engine friendly URLs, and if you use multiple host names. This means that the same page may be listed multiple times by search engines, diluting your rankings.

Our friends at Google have gone some way to helping us solve this problem by adding support for a hidden tag that allows us to specify a Canonical URL for each page.

A Canonical URL is a (hidden) tag that tells search engines what the preferred URL is for that page in order to consolidate rankings under a single URL. Although Google introduced this tag, it is now supported by a number of major search engines.

So, every Article, Group, Shop Category and Shop Item page now has this hidden tag in it, politely telling Google what the proper "search-engine friendly" URL is for this page, which they should use in their listings.

Now, this bit is important for those of you who have multiple host names. By default we use relative URLs, so that the Canonical URL respects the current domain name. This does mean, however, that search engines will retain multiple listings if you have multiple domain names. So, we've added a new setting on the "Host Names" settings page (under General in the Settings area) which allows you to dictate that the Canonical URL should always contain your primary host name. If you set this (which we highly recommend) then all of your other host names should gradually disappear from Google's listings over time and your rankings will be consolidated under your primary host name.

Note that it can take anything from hours to months for Google to re-index a site so don't expect to see instant changes, but over time this should help your rankings considerably.

More tasks for Organisations in the Query Wizard

Maximum amount validator in Payment Group options

When visitors make payments or donations via your Payment Groups, it seemed obvious that you might want to set a minimum amount for donations so we've had that feature in all along. But we've been working recently with some organisations who need to be able to set maximum amounts here for legal or tax reasons. So, now whenever you specify a variable payment in your Payment Groups, you have the option to set a maximum as well as a minimum. Just leave it blank if the sky's the limit!

Other enhancements and bug fixes

• We've made some significant improvements to the site and shop search. Visitors were sometimes seeing error screens for particular queries. We've tracked down and fixed this bug, and made some performance improvements at the same time.
• As part of our ongoing work to standardise the features and interfaces in module settings, we've made some improvements to the way ordering is defined in Article List and Shop Items List components. There's also a small change on the user side - with the options for defining the order in a Shop Items List now broken out into two dropdowns.
• The Terms and Conditions on your sites now reflect our new office address.
• The start of 2010 saw a return to the higher 17.5% VAT rate in the UK. We've updated a handful of places in the system that referred to the lower 15% rate. We had already made changes to pricing on January 1st as agreed with customers.
• The links to user's websites that appear on Shareinsight article comments were being corrupted, this is now fixed.
• Where an organisation had more than one page of staff members, attempting to view the second and subsequent pages resulted in an error screen. We've mended this.
•  As always we've been working away behind the scenes to improve performance and make sure things are running as you expect.