| General |
| Technical |
| Bug-Fixes Login Issues (new) Underscore in links Page functionality issues |
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Swiss.org.au is an initiative by the Swiss Club of Queensland Inc. to set up a web portal for all Swiss clubs and non-profit organisations in Australia. There is no other organisation behind swiss.org.au. The initial setup of this site and all the work that is coming up to make it the best portal for swiss people in Australia is done by off-ice applications on a voluntary basis. off-ice applications is using swiss.org.au as a reference project and therefore guarantees constant improvment of this site. As swiss.org.au is database driven, we differ between database size and external files. We do not have limits on the database, so that means, there can be as many pages, events or members as needed. Although, we put limits on external files. External files is everything that is not text like graphics, videos, pdf-files, word documents, excel sheets or other files. The upload limit has been increased from previous 2MB to 3MB per club. Additionally, each member can have 100KB of external files on the Member Profile page (what is enough to show a couple of pictures anyway). All Swiss Clubs, Consulates and Non-Profit Organisations in Australia and New Zealand can join swiss.org.au. Please ask the webmaster for details. The fee is $49/year and is only to cover admin costs (like phone calls and member services) and the hosting of the whole site. It will NOT increase in upcoming years. As this is a .org.au site, we do not allow advertising of businesses other than the clubs itself on the swiss.org.au server. Although, providing a link to businesses hosted on other servers is allowed. Very early after launch of this website, we already have strong interests form about a dozen Swiss Clubs in Australia. Currently, 15 clubs from Australia and New Zealand have already joined up: We also have a complete directory of all Swiss Clubs and Organisations on our Where to Go? page. Non-participating clubs have their contact details there and we provide links to their own website. It is important for us that we have correct contact details at all times and ask non-participating clubs to send us changes of addresses.
We offer clubs joining swiss.org.au a free transfer of their contents from another website. Although it is very easy to maintain contents with a simple web interface on swiss.org.au, it is a good kickstart to see how things are done. It also means that you are up and running from the first day you sign up. Currently, not many member had put their profile online.
Publishing private information on the web is something many people are
cautious about. Generally, you should not publish private data on the
web where anybody
has access to. Check your personal homepage too ? Just to have a hidden
url is not enough protection ! It is now easier to get to a club homepage. Before,
you had to know the ID of that club and then needed to enter http://www.swiss.org.au/home.php?ID=xx
as an URL into your browser. This has been simplified. Now, simply put
the club-alias behind swiss.org.au and you will be redirected to the appropriate
page automatically. |
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Online RSVP, like feedback and discussion boards have been available to registered users only. A new checkbox allow registration for visitors (non swiss.org.au users) has been implemented in the edit event page to also allow visitors to register online. For existing events, it is disabled by default. The procedure to handle visitor online registration is slightly different. Visitors are requested to enter their email address (a seaparate field will appear automatically). As visitors can not see their own registration, so the person responsible for the event should send them an email confirmation. This can be done by clicking on confirm besides their registration details. Registered members of swiss.org.au should always logon first before they register for events so they can use advanced features of online registration (like deleting and re-submitting their details).
Email notification for discussion boards have been implemented. Users now see a link besides the 'Post New Message' Button to enable/disable email notification. Participating users can set this for each discussion board separately. Enabled, it will automatically send an email when another user posts a new message on the board. The mail contains the page name (title) and the message itself (content) together with a link to the discussion board. Users should not reply to this mail - they should go to the board itself by clicking on the board-link. This will take them directly to the board (if they are not logged on yet, they will be taken to the logon page first). Also, when Delete Board is clicked, it will send the user that clicks it an email containing all the messages posted on the board. This is great for archiving messages or forwarding them to participating users.
The preview checkbox in the Edit Table of Contents has been replaced by a 3-state dropdown field that allows to display pages either with or without a preview or hide it at all in the Table of Contents page. Hiding pages is useful when you have a lot of single pages that you link from another page and should not appear in the Table of Contents. Make sure that you acyually create links to hidden pages, otherwise they can not be accessed.
Events can now have multiple dates, e.g. you have a Jass-Evening every 2nd Thursday, you can enter 2002-03-07 2002-03-21 2002-04-04 ... in the Date field of the event. For every date, the event will be listed in the What's On and List of Events pages.
Creating lists whose elements span over 2 lines could just be realized by creating a table. You now can use a [ ] (a space between square brackets) that indents the text of additional lines to avoid using complex tables. It simply inserts an invisible spacer-element.
A very nice new feature is the implementation of slideshows. Use the following syntax: [pic.jpg slide]description This feature is great if you have a lot of pictures on one page. You can have more than one slideshow section on one page and slideshows work in club homepages, events, information pages. The fast loading thumbnails are generated on the server, automatically updated if you change pictures and stored in a subdirectory of your club/member directory. They are not taken into consideration in your download limit.
You now have the possibility to create local links in the red menus. To do so, add the link separated with a # to the Menu Text (e.g. Emigrants#letus.php?ID=5). This works with main menus (Edit Club Menus) and sub menus (Edit Page). Further details are described on those edit-pages. Pages have been extended with the ability of implementing online forms that is e.g. used for Club Member Registration. In Edit Page, the checkbox Page has a discussion Board has been replaced by a drop-down box and you can select select this option there. Below, you can define the form sections in detail of how it should look like (Please refer to the information described below this field). Submitted forms will then be sent via email to the specified address for further processing.
A new field Restrict access to certain users in Edit Page allows to restrict the access to this page to the listed users only. Others will not have access and they do not see the page in the menu (if set). This has been implemented for critical information that should be visible to a few users only.
The screen Edit Page has been reprogrammed and is now easier to understand. After selecting or changing the field Page Functionality, only relevant fields with their description are displayed. A new functionality is Dataset Search. It allows to search an Excel-like spreadsheet with rows (separate lines) and columns (separated by |) by any word (at least 3-letters). Starting the search, only datasets where the word was found are displayed with their details. Results are limited to 20 datasets for security reasons. Datasets can either be entered manually or can be uploaded from a standard csv-file like it can be easily exported from any application like MS-Excel, MS-Access or others. You can now copy contents from any other page or event you have access to. To do that, open the page/event first you want to copy from. Remember the ID of that page/event. Then edit the page/event you want to copy the contents to. Simply enter the ID number in the contents field and click on update. This procedure works for content fields (page and event) and for online forms. This is great for beginners as you can see how Others have done it.
The standard Events menu now separates between (upcoming) Events and Past Events. If past events still have a menu text assigned to it, they will be separated by a sub-header Past Events: in the Events menu.
It is now possible to participate in events posted from other clubs. Before, you had to add a pseudo event in your club and then somehow link inside the text to the event in the other club. This was not very nice and produced redundant entries in the What's On section. Now, you can simply refer to any other event ID (or ID's) from another club by entering them into the new field under the Events Menu in the Edit Main Menu page. Such events will now be shown when you klick on the Events menu. If the editor of the event has defined a Menu Text, it will also appear in your Events menu. |
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Recently, users experiences timeouts when logged in what caused all sorts of problems. This had been fixed now and the login-routines had been improved at the same time and made even more secure.
There was a bug in links that underscores (like they occasionally appear) have been converted to non-breaking spaces. The usage of underscore is now defined like the following: - To make a non-breaking space, use a single underscore
(_)
Since the introduction of new page functionalities, there has been some minor bugs associated with it. First, new pages added seemed to get lost when not updated immediately. Second, pages defined as links could not beeing edited anymore. These issues have been resolved now. Pages defined as links can be accesses through Edit TOC. If using a page instead of a TOC for a main menu, you have to temporarily disable it (enter 0 as page) in order to get access to it. |
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