Release 11.0 - Key Features

Until now, any formatting of ScoutsTracker notes, special awards, signup instructions, etc. had to be done via wiki-style markup. This was okay for the geeks amongst us, but was too unintuitive for the bulk of the scouters/youth/parents.

Consequently, I've added a “what you see is what you get” editor to many fields in ScoutsTracker. This lets you change formatting (e.g., colors, bold, size), or create bullet items, lists, tables and links through an interface that ought to be familiar to most users.

Additionally, the “links” button in the editor allows you to pick from a list of badges and upcoming events so you can quickly and simply add references to other badges/events without having to go to the other event's or badge's “Share” page to copy its special wiki markup code.

The new editor affects the following items

• Emails
• Event description/leader/postmortem notes
• Event signup instructions
• Notes (both youth and section) on badge requirements
• Login signature
• Special Awards
• “Troop News” section (see below)

All existing bits of formatted text were converted from wiki markup to HTML, where possible. In the few cases where the wiki markup was too complicated to correctly convert (e.g., nested bullet lists, tables, blockquotes) the original wiki formatting has been left in place, and ScoutsTracker will auto-detect whether any particular chunk of text was recorded in wiki or HTML format and use the most appropriate editor.

By popular demand, can now find out who has as read your emails, by selecting “Opened Email Tracking” in the email composition window. However, there's a couple of caveats. The first is that the tracking relies on an embedded 1×1 pixel image to determine if the email has been read. But if the user does not choose to download images when they view their email (or reads it in plaintext mode), then ScoutsTracker will have no way of detecting that an email was actually read. So if a email recipient is flagged as having opened the email, you can be confident it was. But the converse is not true… i.e., an email may have been read even it it doesn't result in a read receipt being sent to ScoutsTracker. The other caveat is that sometimes read receipts will take hours to be delivered to ScoutsTracker. So if you test this feature by sending yourself and email, don't expect the “open” status to be shown immediately beside your own email address!

Additionally, the following enhancements were made to email.

• Added an automatic refresh to email status (so you can see the recipients' statuses change after a mailing)
• Selected recipient email addresses show in bold in “quick pick” lists
• You can send out fancy formatted emails!
• Viewing sent emails wasn't showing if a delegate email address had been used

By popular demand, there's now a new “Troop News” section on the “Home” page.

You can edit this field to add any information you feel is relevant. E.g., a common request is a place to list lost and found“ items after a camp, or important reminders about upcoming events.

This field uses the new editor, so you can format your text any way you want.

People wanted some changes to the Scouter fields, so I've added them

• Scouters now have an “Other Roles” field (e.g., “ASM” or “GC”), just like the youth.
• Scouters now have an “Other Email Addresses” field. I.e., if you want to be BCC'd on scouting emails to your work address, then this is now possible.

Thanks to some dedicated volunteers, the OAS badges now include the full “Requirements”, rather than just the “Competencies” which didn't actually contain enough information for Youth and Scouters to determine if the requirement had been satisfactorily demonstrated. To see the extra details, click on the “Show Details” link at the top of each OAS badge's requirements.

Events that are imported from a different section level (e.g., Troop to Pack) now include all the OAS “Related Requirements”.

OAS requirements are now exposed in the personal record sheets.

• COMMISSIONERS: commissioners with section accounts should be able to push “Everyone” visibility events (and don't need notification emails, either).
• Replace “Automatically set meeting name/location” confirmation with a lightBox
• “Troop Events” | “Meetings” | “Add” now prompts for “Automatically set meeting name/location”
• Added “Cancel” button to toolbar LHS when creating new event, added confirmation to “Next” button when no labels selected

• Merge should show checkmark for currently selected youth
• Disallow searches of non-alphanumeric characters
• Anything in the event location field that looks like a URL will now be hyperlinked
• Main website spawns new windows for each section when you click on the sidebar links
• Add tooltip showing badge requirement text over related reqs

• Section's default event contacts weren't being applied to pushed/imported events
• Canceling out of new event was showing a half-created event
• “Important date” events can have finalization hints shown that aren't relevant
• “Important date” events have start/stop fields visible

• Typo in callback method name was prevent some updates from syncing
• Youth merging was broken
• Mis-formatted plaintext rendering of email verification messages
• Couldn't drill down to special award found by doing a text search
• Complete-but-not-yet awarded language strips (and other uniform-invariant badges) weren't being counted correctly against shopping list

• Custom welcome text not cleared when switching between accounts
• Wrong font color on right-hand sidebar menu when viewed on narrow screens

• FACEBOOK: Referenced images should use the best protocol, not assume that “http:” is acceptable
• FACEBOOK: Couldn't post to “closed” groups

• COMMISSIONERS: Now force a fresh fetch everytime you use the 'Connect' button to switch between accounts
• COMMISSIONERS: Event signup was showing a bogus section tag for “key people”

• Fresh composition of emails weren't sending (empty body message)
• Replace ugly “deletion is permanent” confirmation message boxes with lightbox confirms

• Couldn't discard new emails
• Better plaintext email conversion for legacy code

• Personal Record Sheets presentation of OAS slightly improved
• Added symbolic links to stylesheet that was missing for non-troop sections
• <strong> elements weren't being displayed in bold in event descriptions
• Editor link insertion was using relative links rather than the specified values
• Couldn't delete email attachments
• Changes to subscription sources weren't being propagated correctly to subscribers

• Postmortem notes revert to wiki formatting
• Subscription notes weren't overriding legacy notes
• Fixed an issue with failing to load in off-line mode
• ENH: need a way to a) report the version, and b) force a reload if it's not current
• ENH: allow embedded images
• ENH: increased attachment size to 4MB
• ENH: changed paragraph spacing to be zero, to align with GMail and Facebook
• ENH: improved plaintext rendering of emails
• FIREFOX: edit window height could switch to zero as you switched between pages