December 2021 introduced some new features into Retreat Portal Console.
Listing vs. Published
Marketing Category in Program Search
"Save" Reminders in Program Details
Meeting Search - Equipment and Socials too!
Meals Report
Socials Report
Embedding Register Buttons
Hide Donation option on a per-program basis
Group Portal - Friendlier user experience
Listing vs. Published
The marketing section of the Console has been updated to use the word "Listing" rather than "Published". This is because any program which has marketing information is technically available on the internet. Whether a program appears on the listing of programs from Retreat Portal is influenced by the "Listing" flag.
Search view...
Marketing edit view...
Marketing Category
The Program Search page has been enhanced to show the Marketing Category rather than just a simple yes/no if a program has marketing information created for it.
There is a lot of information to manage for programs and we're trying to put as much pertinent information in front of our users as is reasonably possible given screen sizes. We're targeting the Program Search page as the 'go to' page for finding programs and we're always eager to know what information to best show on this page.
"Save" Reminders in Program Details
We confess that the Program Details page is massive and has a lot of sections and if you forget to click the Save button in the top right before jumping around you'll likely forget about committing your changes.
We've taken a step to address this...
If you edit a field in the Program Details page and click to go to another section of the page you'll be alerted about unsaved changes and asked if you want to still navigate to another section.
Meeting Search - Equipment and Socials too!
We've added support for tracking Meetings within Retreat Portal.
The purpose of 'Planning' pages is to be able to search and filter to find exactly what you are looking for so you can find, verify, and edit what you want. In this case the Meeting Search is meant to help you find meetings by Program, Group, date, duration, etc.
You can also quickly see whether equipment has been assigned to the meeting and whether there are any socials associated with the meeting.
Search and Planner pages offer advanced search and filtering capabilities because they are meant to help you manage information. These pages have a search bar at the top of the table and the column headers are blue. The search applies to all columns - you can type all or some of a room name, program name, group name, or even setup and see the results that match. Clicking the headers gives you the ability to sort and filter based on the information in that column. The Search/Planner pages also have Edit links and sometimes other 'Action' links allowing users to change and update the information being shown - in this case Meetings.
Click the Create button at the top of the table to create a meeting.
Click the Add or Edit button in the Equipment column for any of the meetings to bring up a form to manage the equipment for the meeting. Easily move equipment back and forth to include equipment for a meeting.
Click the Add or Edit button in the Socials column for managing all of the socials for that meeting.
Meals Report
The Meals Report in Retreat Portal is meant to be comparable to the Planned Meals report in Retreat Manager. The layout and information is nearly identical.
Unlike Planner or Search pages the Reports do not have filtering or search capabilities. The reason is these reports are meant to show specific information over a given period of time. The reports are also meant to be safe to print - although printing web pages can offer other challenges that we're also researching how to best address.
We offer a switch to also show or hide guest-specific dietary information. The switch is at the top next to the date range selectors. When flipped to show the guest dietary information, then any guest with dietary information will be shown under the program they are registered to attend. There are checkboxes to represent whether the guest is having a breakfast, lunch, or dinner to help the chef know which meals to apply the restrictions to.
Socials Report
The Socials Report in Retreat Portal is meant to be comparable to the Planned Social report in Retreat Manager. The layout and information is nearly identical.
The Reports do not have filtering or search capabilities like you would find in the Meeting Search page. The reports are meant to show specific information over a given period of time. The reports are also meant to be safe to print - although printing web pages can offer other challenges that we're also researching how to best address.
Embedding Register Buttons
We've made it easier to embed a program's register button your website. Each program that has marketing enabled now has a section which shows you the HTML code to copy and paste into your website which will show the latest status of the program and, when clicked, allow the guest to register.
You can see our full tutorial here:
Hiding Donation section on a per-program basis
We've added a flag on the Marketing section of a program to hide the donation section. If you have donations enabled, but don't want to request donations for specific programs, then you can set Hide Donations to 'Yes'.
Group Portal - Friendlier User Experience
For those of you using the Group Portal you know that while the module is extremely useful for group leaders it can be a bit confusing when a new user lands in the Group Portal.
We've softened that experience a bit by changing around a few of the phrases and creating a friendly landing page. When a user logs in to the Group Portal they're immediately told what program they're managing and offered some suggestions about what they may want to do.
