Canadian Campus Movement Tracker Development

2010-01-14T14:48:00.000-08:00

Pulse 1.1 is now live on http://pulse.campusforchrist.org

There is one known bug where directory's timetable last updated timestamp is in UTC time.

Video Explaining Ministry Teams

2010-01-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

Here is a short video explaining using ministry teams to navigate the Pulse in this new release:

Pulse update coming soon -- will have timetable last updated times, emailing groups. detailed change log follows #c4cPulse

2010-01-13T13:38:00.000-08:00

On Thursday January 14th around 9am EST we will be updating the pulse. As a result, the pulse will be slow or unavailable for a short period as we update it. The update will include a timetable last updated timestamp, an email group members feature, and more.

You can read a detailed release notes:

Pulse 1.1 Revision History

You can upload a profile picture

Students are forced to choose a campus before they can do anything else on the pulse.

Email feature

On directory

There is a checkbox for each row and a dropdown to perform actions on selected users. Currently email is the only action.

On search results that return more than one page, you can select everyone by clicking the check box on the table header. Like gmail's select all feature, a message allowing you to select everyone will appear. "All 74 people on this page are selected. Select all 3724 people from this search."

On groups

In the group view, you can click Email to email everyone in the group, including people marked as interested and requests. You can select specific people to email by using the checkboxes. You can select blocks of people with the same level (ex. all members) using the checkbox in the member's header row.

Use {{first_name}} and {{last_name}} in the email body to have the emails substitute the first and last name respectively

Timetable last updated

A timestamp of when a user updated the timetable is now displayed in:

directory column

when viewing a specific person's timetable on the top right

in the group view

when adding people to a group, searching for a person returns results with the timetable last updated as one of the columns

timestamps are displayed in PST

Ministry teams

High-level overview

The case where staff are assigned to two or more campuses is handled better.

Instead of one Campus for Christ "view" or the system, we divided the system in to slices by ministry teams.

The slices are called "Staff Teams" and each team has one or more campuses associated with it. In most cases, there is one campus, ex. "Western Staff Team" has only Western. Other metro staff teams have multiple campuses, ex. Toronto Metro has Ryerson, U of T, and York.

The Ministries section on the profile is for staff only (this is where your Staff Team will show up). The campuses section is for students only. The only campuses staff should have on their profile should be Alumni status.

Practically, this means...

Each staff has "Staff" status on "Campus for Christ"

Each staff now also has a "Staff Team" such as Toronto Metro, Western, etc.

We created the Staff Team for each staff, based on previous data in the system. If you appear to be on the wrong staff team, you can either try to fix it yourself using the pencil icon, or email the tech support.

Staff can now change their staff team themselves through their profile. Click the pencil icon

Students can change their campus through the profile as well.

Only administrators can make a student staff.

Everything should be limited to the campuses in your staff team, including directory, groups, and statistics.

You can view other staff teams by using the Change link under the top right of the screen under your name.

gcx/itg guys fixed a bug on their gcx login screen that wasn't sending people back to the pulse #c4cPulse

2010-01-12T17:49:00.000-08:00

This may have contributed to some of the confusion using gcx. This also was happening from the intranet -- actually from any campusforchrist.org site that used gcx. You may have also seen a banner about changes to the login screen -- that was also a mistake and is for US sites only. My understanding is that though our login screen may be changing at some point, it will be to brand it with c4c colors.

when viewing timetables, the header will scroll with you #c4cPulse

2009-10-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

In order to make it easier to tell which column is what.

development continues, but not put online as often

2009-10-26T13:18:00.000-07:00

As the pulse/CMT gets used, we've decided to work on our change management. We won't be updating the server as much, except in bigger versions that will be more documented. I'll try to still keep logging on here as I work on things, without the twitter updates.

For the next version, the major thing we're working on is handling ministry teams properly. This involves moving data around to individual "ministries" for each campus or groups of campuses. There's a bunch of testing and tweaking to make sure the proper people show up in directories and groups.

new users now have a prompt to set their campus, on the groups join page #c4cPulse

2009-10-06T21:04:00.001-07:00

When someone goes on the pulse for the first time, on the join a groups page, there is now a message telling that they they need to choose their campus first. That link brings them directly to their profile edit page (they won't need to click "Edit" -- it will automatically be in edit mode) and will make the "Campus:" prompt be red to get their attention. Once they save, there is a notification that they can now join a group, with a link to the join groups page. The intent is to make it easier and clearer for a new user what needs to be done to join a group.

Profile pics online #c4cPulse

2009-10-06T12:45:00.001-07:00

The profile pictures features should now be working; let me know if there's any problem with it.

For those early DGs, earliest timetable time is now 6am #c4cPulse

2009-10-06T12:31:00.001-07:00

For existing groups, when you compare timetables, it will display white for the new times since people won't have info for those times.

students are restricted by campus on directory; fixed a login bug #c4cPulse

2009-09-25T13:46:00.001-07:00

when student leaders go to the directory, they are now restricted by their campus

some people were getting a crash on login (Leemarc was the case that brought it to our attention); that should now be fixed

directory shows only one row per person #c4cPulse

2009-09-23T12:17:00.000-07:00

I fixed the bug on directory that was showing multiple rows per person, for people with multiple campuses or multiple logins for one person.

I also changed Last Logged In column to On Pulse Since. This should give a better indication of who has been added to the pulse, as that column is independent of whether they have actually logged in or not. However, some people have an On Pulse Since of today which is unfortunately a result of implementing this feature now.

fixed "User can't add 'Year in School' until Campus field is saved first" #c4cPulse

2009-09-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

There was a bug that's now fixed that made it so that when editing a profile, a user couldn't choose their year in school until the campus was chosen.

last login updated correctly now #c4cPulse

2009-09-16T22:51:00.000-07:00

There was a bug that was displaying other people's last login for yours on the directory view. Last login was also not being updated when you go to a page in the pulse while already logged in to gcx (from any gcx-enabled site), thereby circumventing the usual login page, which is where it was being updated. In any case it should be updated any time you visit the site anew now.

leaders and coleaders of groups can edit timetables and profiles of members; groups join page doesn't hide groups now #c4cPulse

2009-09-16T21:39:00.000-07:00

- leaders and coleaders of groups can edit timetables and profiles of members of their groups
- Josh Starcher fixed the directory page in IE, and made the default view in groups join and manage pages to list all groups
update: the new groups page needs more testing; went back to how it was until I can test it further
update2: online now

add student window now has campus, year, and contact info options #c4cPulse

2009-09-15T15:12:00.000-07:00

The last few days I've been cleaning up and improving adding students and leaders. I added a dropdown for campus and year in school. We actually had two copies of a very similar form, the other one being in Manage -> Leaders/Staff -> add leader or staff. That form is now shared under the scenes which is a better and more efficient way of doing it.

You can also add address information on the add student page now. There's a link to expand the form with those fields.

I also fixed a bug with saving and creating groups without a group type that was causing a crash.

fixed bug on the pulse that caused a crash when saving a group with no group type chosen #c4cPulse

2009-09-13T22:26:00.000-07:00

There was a bug on the pulse such that when saving a group that you were editing details for, if you didn't choose a group type, it would crash. Group type is a required field, so it now gives a proper error on the page.

pulse directory search by email now works

2009-09-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

There was an issue with searching the directory by email while using the Canadian schema that's now fixed.

pulse now has last login column in directory

2009-09-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

you can now see the last time someone logged in to the pulse on the directory. This timestamp is actually when they logged in last to the pulse, pat, or MT; but it should still give the desired result of having an idea of who is active.

bug fix with timetable compare colors

2009-09-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

There was a bug that let some people who didn't fill out their timetable still be included in the comparison. It should be fixed now and the colors done properly.

group leading enables timetable editing

2009-09-04T13:00:00.001-07:00

If you leading a group, whatever role you are, you can edit the timetables of the people in your group now. Involved students and student leaders can also add people directly in to their groups now as well now.

Made a behind the scenes change in that the dev branch now has similar default permissions as emu. I had been working in emu, but realized that since nobody is really using the default permissions we'll just use what we have in emu since that's production proven (or will be, as our staff use it). Should Au or US want to change those permissions that's fine with me.

bug fixes

2009-09-03T12:19:00.001-07:00

There have been a few bug fixes we've done since going online. The most substantial one is that marking yourself as interested in a group wasn't working.

We've also gotten reports that student leaders are not able to edit other people's timetables, and a few other things. Seems to be a high priority task for a number of our users.

More touchups, server setup

2009-08-20T15:08:00.000-07:00

Today we added the support tab and a page explaining how to make a new account. That page is important because GCX takes a few minutes before the new account is ready.

There were also a few bug fixes for technical stuff. We had one bug in emu that was making new person ids be really large numbers, that's now fixed. I also set up our domain and set up Eric for updating it.

Josh also merged our changes to the master branch and put them on his production server, woohoo!

2009-08-19T16:04:00.000-07:00

We continue to polish the movement tracker. There are a number of more subtle permissions fixes that have been done and other smaller bugs.

The most major thing we've done is some fixes to make pages (particularly the groups list and join pages) render correctly in IE. We had some invalid html (forgetting a >, etc) that rendered ok in FF but not IE.

We've also branded the CMT for Canada.

more group updates

2009-08-13T17:02:00.000-07:00

I did considerable cleanup and refactoring of the group code. Some of the remnant from Waterloo project was a bit messy.

The main change is that now what shows up is entirely permissions-based. This means that staff can modify everything for all groups, since they have those permissions. Students can only modify that for the groups they are leader in.

updating groups

2009-08-12T21:04:00.001-07:00

Most of the work Eric and I did today is on groups. We added the ability to change the level of people already in a group. I ended up doing quite a bit of refactoring in group_involvements_controller to make things a bit cleaner and concise.

We also made it so that interested requests don't need to be approved. It's kind of silly to require approval to be interested. That meant we could reduce the amount of text on the dashboard for requests and not show the role requested (it will always be 'member'). Later we will add an option when creating/editing the group to toggle whether member joins require approval.

I also made the CMT work in IE by turning on IE7 compatibility mode. I also had to tweak the tooltips javascript slightly as it was getting an error in IE.

Beta testing continues

2009-08-11T14:52:00.000-07:00

Had our checkin meeting today.

I added a way of promoting people, by clicking on an edit icon beside their role in their profile view. For example, (Student ), when clicked, brings you to a page with a dropdown for roles. This should eventually be improved to a nicer way of doing it, probably with ajax and popping up an edit window.

Eric added a config variable to disable the leadership notes. We were getting errors with it, and I'm not clear on how it functions. I'm not even clear who would see the notes, so we need to improve the documentation before we release it. Eric also fixed some minor bugs with the dorms dropdown and with setting the end/start time for a group.

Beta testing continues

2009-08-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

Beta testing continues. Josh finding lots of bugs continues. We're realizing that Josh is using an account that doesn't have admin status, so there are a number of permission restrictions that we never noticed.

Made it so that when you click on a campus in the manage tab and on your profile (listing which campuses you're involved with), it goes to the directory, and has is filtered by that campus.

Made emu's directory view show the province abbreviation instead of the whole thing (ex 'ON' for 'Ontario') so that the view doesn't expand off the right of the page.

Josh Hau joined our beta testing team and gave some good suggestions.

I fixed a few other bugs with the movement tracker and emu, most related to changes we've made recently. One such bug was keeping groups from showing up in the manage or join pages, which, needless to say, was slowing down the beta testers. That's now fixed.

2009-08-07T11:01:00.001-07:00

fixed a number of bugs. beta testing for the canadian release continues (bugs are being fixed in dev)

Improved the directory column sorting. It handles different schemas (through mappings.yml) better. Emu was crashing on changing sort column. (commit, commit, commit)

Added exception_notification plugin, which can be customized for each country in their own branch. (Exception notification sends emails whenever the app crashes) Got rid of hoptoad, which is a similar service that we don't use anymore once they started charging.

Added the connexion bar. Whenever you're logged in with GCX, the connexion bar will appear on the top.

2009-08-06T15:12:00.000-07:00

When making add new person, the state dropdown for the contact form is now ajaxed to change when the country selected is changed.

Also, when adding a new student in the directory, a link going directly to that person timetable is displayed.

Also, people with permission now have the ability to view and edit other people's timetables. There is also a config variable to allow staff to edit any student's timetable if that student is in their ministry.

Soon the ability to have the GCX Connexion Bar will be available. I suspect it will be running by mid day tomorrow.

2009-08-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

We've merged our development in to twinge/dev.

The group details page is now nicer to look at since the columns are equal lengths.

Joining groups page is different. It's now listing all the groups, with join links, instead of using dropdowns. This should result in less clicks required to join.

test

2009-08-05T11:00:00.001-07:00

Just testing