A Quick Update
It’s been a while since there’s been a post to the blog here, so I thought I’d give a quick update on where things are with Stafftool and what’s in store for future versions of the app.
First off, there have been a few tweaks to existing features of Stafftool, some additions both small and larger, and a lot of work done on the backend that’s not necessarily visible to users (but which make the future development of the app more solid).
Contributions
Let’s start with the most obvious addition that hasn’t been blogged about yet - Contributions. Currently in a somewhat “beta” form, the Contributions section represents a large piece of functionality that had been planned from the very beginning, but was re-prioritized down a bit upon the initial launch. After the main features were solidified, the Contributions portion was tackled.
In its current incarnation, it enables your organization to easily and quickly enter in contributions from individual people as well as grand totals for events if you prefer to enter in lump sums. You can tag contributions to organize them into different funds, and you can see at a glance what your grand and YTD totals are, giving trends and fund breakdowns. You can view contributions on people and event info cards, and people from your organization can see their individual giving when they log in. Here’s a quick screencast that shows the main section in action:
A more recent addition is a CSV export so you can bring it into your spreadsheet and do some further number crunching. There are some more things planned for the future, and we hope to have to finalized and taken out of it’s beta phase in time for a more widespread adoption for the new year.
Smaller Feature Additions
OpenID Login - you can now use OpenID to log into your account. To set it up, simply edit your profile and click the Use OpenID link next to your login name and fill in your OpenID URL and update.
Then, next time you log in, click the login with OpenID link, enter your OpenID URL and authenticate at your OpenID provider to enter your account. That’s all there is to it!
iCal Subscriptions - You can now subscribe to your personal calendar of events with iCal (or Outlook 2007 or any other app that supports iCal feed subscriptions) by clicking the Subscribe to this calendar button in the events section. It includes a special authentication token so that you can receive your private events on your desktop app just like you would see them within Stafftool.
Future Updates
As I said, there are a lot of things that are currently being worked on that will be coming out in future releases. Some will be coming out as individual feature updates, and some will be part of the larger version upgrade.
One feature that is planned to be released in the near term is recurring event exceptions. This is something that has been wanted for a long time, but proved to be a tricky problem… thankfully, it’s going to soon be a reality. You’ll be given the option to delete an individual occurrence of a repeating event, as well as update an individual date with new information. There are a few more tweaks to finalize with it, but it’s almost here.
Another enhancement being worked on is a more compact tabbed entry and editing interface. Currently in Stafftool, the entry and editing forms can get to be pretty long. Sometimes you just want to enter some general information and that’s it, so you enter the first few fields and then scroll past all the fields you don’t need to submit the form. The tabbed interface will make the firm much more compact and have all the basic fields on the first tab so you can enter quickly. Here’s a preview of how it’s looking.
As you can see, everything is now organized into logical tabs, cleaning things up a lot.
More to Come
There are more things in the works that I’ll be posting about in the future. Apologies for seemingly disappearing for while… I hope to get back into the swing of things with the blog here, and I look forward to hearing from you all!
1 year ago