Posted by In my attic, the heating is working like a champ to keep me warm. 🥶 If it didn’t do that, my hands would probably be so cold that I wouldn’t be able to write anything about the new version. There’s a lot to report. We’ve introduced a new placeholder engine, continued working on our new group module, and made other minor changes to other modules.
New Placeholders
Good communication consists of many building blocks. ChurchTools already offers the option of contacting people in various ways. One way is e-mail. It is already possible to write to individuals, entire groups or event officials in one step.
Few placeholders were previously available, but this is now changing. With version 3.103, all personal data is also available as placeholders. Using a simple menu, you can quickly find the right placeholder and thanks to the coloring in the editor, it is immediately clear where a placeholder is used and where normal text is.
However, it can happen that not all fields are filled in or are visible to me (you know, security levels). This information is calculated immediately and displayed below the editor to show whether a placeholder cannot be filled in everywhere.
A visual check using the new preview is also included. The preview button shows the written email as it would be received by the recipient. This allows you to quickly find any major errors and adjust them before the email is sent.
We have added more detailed information and which placeholders are currently available for use in ChurchTools in the help section:
- Placeholders – Administration – Help pages
- How to use Placeholders in eMails – Administration – Help pages
- Placeholders in ChurchTools – Administration – Help pages
Outlook: We will implement more placeholders in different contexts over time. This new solution, with which we are replacing the old placeholder logic, makes this extension easier. So stay tuned.
Improved field assignment when importing people
Automatic field mapping now works even better when importing CSV files with people data. Your data will now be integrated into our platform even more accurately and smoothly. This improvement will save you time and improve your experience with our software.
Permission Management & New Group Permissions
Permission management is the backbone of ChurchTools. We are always making improvements here to ensure flexibility and yet improve usability. If you know the permission management by heart, you will notice that we have made changes to the naming and sorting of rights in the Persons & Groups module. This makes the permission management for this module easier to understand.
Five new global permissions are added for groups:
- Create groups of grouptype (
create groups of grouptype) - Edit group (
edit group) - Edit groups of grouptype – except hidden ones (
edit groups of grouptype) - Delete group (
delete group) - Delete groups of grouptye – except hidden ones (
delete groups of grouptype)
A migration has been created for people who previously had similar rights (authoritative administer groups) so that these people, roles and statuses also have the corresponding new rights. This allows finer settings to be made and individual groups of people can be given more rights to individual groups.
When creating a group, the creator automatically receives the global permission edit group for this group. This immediately shows the advantage of the new rights. Anyone who creates a new group, but is then unable to edit it without being granted extensive rights, would not get very far in the end.
Groups
The default visibility “Restricted” is now also displayed on the group cards so that you can immediately see who has access to your group.
You can now easily add people to full groups to make your group memberships more flexible.
If you only have the group-internal permission “Create and copy subgroups”, you can now also create new groups. We have made this easier.
We have improved the error message for date entries to give you clearer feedback.
When adding group members, you can now also directly specify all custom group member fields to organize your data even better. Enjoy using the new features!
You can now edit the title of a group directly in the overview. This makes managing your groups even easier and faster.
No more worries about wrong IDs! We have now implemented a mechanism that intercepts calls to member dialogs with incorrect IDs to avoid possible errors.
When deleting a group member via the context menu, you will now receive an intermediate query. This helps to prevent accidental deletions.
When you click on the link to a person’s profile in a group member dialog, it will now open in a new tab to improve your navigation.
The pinning of columns in the tables has been optimized to give you a better overview of your data.
Resources
The work is simplified by ChurchTools. Among other things, ChurchTools helps by sending changes to resources to the relevant person responsible by e-mail. But if this happens too often, it can quickly become a pain. That’s why there’s now a change: changes to a booking are only sent to the resource administrator by email if the booking has changed in day or time. More peace and quiet in the mailbox – more time for the essentials.
Translations
The translations of the modules are now loaded more efficiently. If no translation is found for the language selected by the user, the English translation is used. With this change, we have removed the option to set a default language, as it is no longer needed.
Further changes
If this is not enough for you, you will find all changes of this and earlier versions in our Changelog.
We hope you like the new version as much as we do. As always, you may leave praise and criticism in our forum.