Austin Taylor
Today we are launching a major new feature of Courtyard, called Sections. We've gotten a number of requests from people who want to divide up their directory into different groups. We have designed this feature in such away that it will support a wide variety of possible uses, including:
- Missionaries
- Former Members
- Staff Members
- Shut-ins
- Itinerant Preachers
We're excited about the way this could expand the usefulness of your directory, by keeping more people connected. We're looking forward to seeing all the creative ways this feature will be used.
Austin Taylor
Over the past couple of months, we've been loading up churches with far more families than we had dealt with in the past. Because of this, we were seeing certain pages slow to a crawl, sometimes taking more than 10 seconds to load every time you clicked something. It was time to do something about it.
So I went through every page in the application and optimized the database queries so that they would load much faster. In most cases I saw improvement greater than 10x. Every page in the app should load in under a second now (with the exception of the PDF exports). The most dramatic change was on the directory listing pages, which were taking 8-12 seconds for our largest churches, and are now virtually instantaneous. We hope this will make it much easier for you to browse your church directory.
If you notice any slow pages that I might have missed, please let us know. As always, we are pleased to receive questions and suggestions at feedback@courtyardapp.com.
Paul Nicholson
We are pleased to announce the launch of an iPhone application designed specifically for our Courtyard clients. The Courtyard iPhone App provides mobile, on-the-go access to any member of your church who has an iPhone. Features one-touch dialing and emailing to anyone in the directory, as well as the ability to browse members' names, addresses, birthdays, and photos. Take church connectivity to the next level!
Best of all, the Courtyard iPhone App is absolutely free! Download it today from the App Store.
Apple, the Apple logo, iPod, and iTunes are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc.
Austin Taylor
We just deployed a small update to the Export section. You can now choose whether you want to include email addresses, cell phone numbers, and birthdays in your directory PDF. We hope that this change will be useful to those of you who want to print your directories.
We want to continue to increase the flexibility of the Export section without making it over-complicated, so it is very helpful to us to hear what features you would actually use. There are hundreds of ways we could allow the PDF export to be customized, but most of them wouldn't be useful, and would only make the software more difficult to use. As always, your feedback is very welcome. You can contact us from the About Us page.
Austin Taylor
When Courtyard was originally designed, it was made with the ability for a directory to have multiple administrators. This was so that people could share the work of managing the directory. This was a nice feature, but the user interface for managing the admins was rather crude. You could only add someone as an administrator by typing out their entire email address.
When we redesigned the Courtyard user interface, we wanted to polish and improve every feature. However, in order to get the new release out when we did, a few of the features we had planned to implement had to get shelved. One of those features was the redesign of the administrator management section. Unfortunately, since the entire screen was redesigned, this meant that there was no longer any way to add multiple administrators (directories that already had multiple administrators still worked, there just wasn't a way to add more).
So I'm pleased to announce that today we were finally able to release the redesigned multiple administrator management feature. If you are a directory administrator, you can go to the Directory Access page under Settings, and you'll see a new button called New Administrator. If you click this button, you'll get a dialog box where you can start typing the name of the person you want to make an administrator. Select the person's name from the autocomplete, and then click Save, and you will see the person you selected show up in the Administrators table. If you want to remove an administrator (other than yourself) you can click the delete button beside their name.
As soon as you make someone an administrator, they will be able to login and see all the same administrator features that you see.
Austin Taylor
The Courtyard team is pleased to announce our largest update to the Courtyard website and web application since we originally launched in April last year. We've gotten a lot of feedback from different people and have learned a ton. This is our first effort at integrating some of these new ideas.
If you look around, you'll notice that just about everything looks a little different. While the core functionality remains the same, we've gone through every screen in order to bring Courtyard to a higher standard of usability and visual design.
One thing you may notice is missing is a login form on the public Courtyard website. This is because we realized that since every directory is a private space for its members, it would make more sense for each directory to have its own login screen. If you are a member of an existing directory, you should have received an email informing you about this change, and where you can find your directory's private login screen.
Another big change was the way we rearranged the Directory Dashboard screen. It now features a log of recent updates to the directory, which we think you'll find to be very useful. Every time somebody adds or changes some information in your directory, you'll be able to see it on the dashboard page so that you can update your personal address book accordingly.
As a part of this redesign, we spent some time thinking about printing and exporting and our conclusion was that people are more interested in printing out personal hard copies than they are in publishing an authoritative version for the whole church. What this means is that we changed the printing section to allow anyone to download directory and photo PDFs separately. We think this will make printing more useful to directory members, while simplifying the interface considerably.
While we were reorganizing the printing section, we decided to go ahead and add a mail merge feature for those of you who send mass mailings to your members. This is something that we never thought of ourselves, but came from a terrific bit of feedback we received when we were showing Courtyard to potential customers.
If you have any ideas or complaints about Courtyard we would be eager to hear what you have to say. Our main concern is to serve our customers and improve our product. We hope to be able to release a lot more frequently in the future, and we would love to be able to integrate any suggestions you might have.
