Welcome to Chrrch v0.5a!
Well,
We're ahead of schedule but it wasn't easy.
Nearing the end of the day today we started merging the changes into production and all things started go to wrong. We did some quick fixes, and we look to be fairly stable. I'm sure there are some missing areas but I'd say for a .5a release we're looking VERY good.
Usability Enhancements
Person Finder is now more usable. It's a dialog window now with it's own easy to use search capabilities. When using Person Finder in the family edit area you are able to quickly enter NEW family members via "Create Person" link found inside of the dialog. Once you type in some basic information about the person they are added instantly.
We also added a more usable photo uploader tool. While searching for anyone you may simply click their photo to change it to something else. No page refresh, just quickly changed and sized to the proper spot on the page. We feel this will help motivate to upload a picture for all of your members, visitors, and staff. Will work pretty well with our upcoming professionally printable directory report.
We have enhanced both the person area, and group area with a new "Info Bar" which is the gray bar you will see on the right. This contains extra information about a person or group that might not fit anywhere else. It contains actions that have been performed on the area, as well as statistics, and other important options such as Deleting capabilities.
On the Info Bar for people, you will find a "Relationship" section. You can change the persons Church Relationship on the fly by selecting a different option. It is instantly changed without a slow page refresh.
Skills/Interests are new to Chrrch as well. This area can also be found on the InfoBar of a person. You can quickly add new skills/interests to the list by clicking the orange asterisk.
Actions
This is a new feature to Chrrch, but I feel it's probably one of a kind compared to other church management systems. Each action you take will be logged in an actions area. Whether you are uploading a picture, changing personal information, or adding a person to a group – it will be logged so you can remember all of the changes you've made. Every single aspect of Chrrch is not currently actionafied(I can make up words too!) but will be as we continue development on other areas of the site. You will however already see several that populate your new dashboard as you make changes to your system.
We're very excited to release this feature to you because we feel it's the type of information you'll need when you want to back track to find out things you've done recently.
We hope you enjoy all the new features and would love to hear your opinions on our Satisfaction Site located at http://www.getsatisfaction.com/remoteapp/
Enjoy!