2016 March

The following is a list of changes associated with the 2016 March release of PatronBase.

Desktop Applications

Licence respecting for Seasons/Subscriptions

To avoid confusion, a check has been added that prevents Admin from allowing the setup of a season if this module has not been licensed.

Option to export attendees

In Marketing, Performances and Productions filters feature options to select Sale Patron, Contact Patron, and now the Attending Patron, along with a checkbox to let you export other patrons. If you cannot see these options at the bottom of the filter, enable them in Administration System Properties by setting the CanSetContactPatron field to True.

Issue Fix: Error when filtering by Zip code

Correction for a customer reported problem in Marketing.

Adjust Marketing Age & Gender Window

Age and Gender window in Marketing required adjustments for internationalisation.

Distributor Functionality & Reporting

Partner Roles extends the previous support for identification of Promotors by allowing an organisation to identify other types of partners. A common type of partner in the cinema industry, for instance, is a Distributor. Rather than constrain partner roles to these two known roles, Partner Roles provides the flexibility to create additional roles that an organisation might need. These roles can then be associated with patrons to identify them as Production Partners. When creating or editing a production, a Production Deal can be defined capturing the fee charged by the Distributor.

Partner Sales and Profit and Loss reports have been created to support this functionality, allowing monitoring of the break-even point for Distributor deals.

Issue Fix: Venue Manager - Summary - Database Login Prompt

An issue was reported where a database login screen was being unexpectedly issued.

VM: >1 Special Dates in Calendar view per day - only 1 seen

Improvements to Venue Manager’s calendar to clearly indicate multiple special date events on a single day. Additional changes have improved the UI setting up the special date.

Hide Web Tickets

In Admin, a new option has been added to system properties to allow hiding the Web Tickets button in the toolbar of the Box Office application.

Issue Fix: QuickPos Eftpos integration refund not working

When making a refund payment in eftpos a warning popped up saying the amount needs to be greater than 0. Further, if a return follows a sale, if the user had not backed out of the sale, it would go back to the sale success page even after the return failure. These issues have been addressed.

Membership - Volunteer Roles Report - Update for new structure

The Volunteer Roles Report has been improved to deal with multiple membership systems and structural changes relating to volunteer data structures.

Plugin Name editable in Admin > Setup > Sales > Payment Types

An editable field Plugin Name appears in the Payment Types form.

Issue Fix: A space in an operator ID caused reporting issues

A customer discovered that their operator 'C BA' caused them issues when running reports because of the space in the operator ID. New operators can only have alpha-numeric characters in the ID.

Box Office - Use the 'New' Icon in toolbar to load new sale

In the performance graphic view, when the 'New' button in the toolbar is clicked, a new Sale window is opened, allowing the sale of products or memberships without selecting seats, booking a ticket, then removing the ticket from the sale.

Field to Record Web Address

The patron personal tab now features a URL field where a personal website can be identified.

Issue Fix: SSR times not capturing sales in the last seconds of the day

When running SSR by payment date, sales made in the last minute of the day were not picked up due to the query using 11:59PM which effectively meant 11:59 and 00 seconds. This Bermuda minute problem has been corrected.

Issue Fix: Syncfusion Reports Local Read Write

An error was generated when Syncfusion Reports attempted to write to a subfolder of the program installation location, an action that is not permitted in recent versions of Windows in most cases.

Issue Fix: Unhandled Exception - Venue Manager - Time line- Vertical Scroll

An issue was reported where an unhandled exception would occur when using the vertical scroll bar in the Venue Manager time line view.

Some OTF fonts not supported in Layout Designer under Win 7 or earlier

OpenType fonts that use CFF outlines, such as Gotham, were not visible in the full font list in Layout Designer under Windows 7. This is because the GDI+ API was used to list installed fonts and GDI+ doesn't support CFF outlines on Windows 7 and earlier. A change was made to use a system call that does support CFF outlined fonts.

Include column and row numbers in seating plan

System Properties now has a setting AdornAreaSeats that takes letters T, L, B, and R. In Box Office, moving the mouse over the performance graphic will result in tooltip boxes for the column and row in the position you have specified. Letters you provide (eg TL) specify the location of the seat adornment eg Top Left. B stands for Bottom, R for Right. N means no seat adornment. Whole words can be used eg Top Left as long as the initial letter is capitalised. You can specify Top and Bottom, and the adornment will appear in both places. Commas will be safely ignored.

Spanish translations

Spanish translations updated for this release.

Issue Fix: Fixed Membership - Due Dates Not Set

Corrected problem where fee start and end dates were not being correctly set when the period type was set to Fixed.

Membership refactor

The code providing the functionality for membership features has been refactored to provide several improvements including other issue fixes mentioned in this revision list. Changes include:

  • Deleting memberships
  • Memberships showing no join date
  • Error when membership unpriced
  • Saving life membership
  • Issue renewing memberships
  • Find Patron window not showing expiry date of membership
  • Patron Attributes tab not showing expiry date of membership

  • Notify options missing in set up and selling but column is in membership tab of patron window

  • Fixed start membership set up as 12 months starting from (date) comes up as (date+1 month) when selling

  • Fixed memberships have an empty members tab in patron record, sale shows in sales tab.

  • Extracting in marketing using join date or fee date no longer works.

  • Reporting -> List - No data to report

  • Reporting -> Overdue Fees - No data to report

  • Adding a patron to membership works but still not able to see start/end dates as there is no sale created

  • Marketing - Join Date / Due Date

Note that some of these issues may not have been present in released versions of the software and may reflect issues identified during the redevelopment and testing of the feature.

Issue Fix: Supporters List Report only displays the first members group

The membership refactoring fixed a problem where the Supporters List Report only displayed the members of the first group.

Issue Fix: Editing Group Membership join/fee due dates updates all patrons in membership

Changing the fee due dates for a group membership changed the date for all existing patrons in the membership. This behaviour has been corrected with the membership refactoring.

Issue Fix: Marketing Patron Attributes column header

Corrected an issue where the Delete label on the column header changed to an internal code default label.

Issue Fix: Shipping fees not shown in Box Office

Shipping Fees were not shown in Box Office for web sales.

Issue Fix: Cannot save booking - Venue Manager

Saving a booking / event was not working when creating a new booking by dragging and event, entering the details, and hitting Save.

Max Seats Per Operator control

A system property has been added: max_seats_per_operator. It defaults to 20, the previously hardcoded value. This is the hard limit for the max number of seats that can be booked online, overriding other limits set elsewhere. This value can be increased if desired, but note that with higher numbers, the possibility exists for malicious users to put large chunks of a performance on hold, without actually buying anything.

Info Buttons on QuickPOS Tiles

Add a Note when defining a product in Admin > Setup > Sales > Products, and a small blue info icon will appear in the top left corner of that product’s tile. Touch this button or hover a mouse pointer over it, and a box will appear containing the text provided in the note field. This feature was requested so operators would have recipes for cocktails at their fingertips, but it will be useful whenever you need to provide operators with extra information about a product for sale.

Box Office Online Module

Fix GA seat selection in BOOM

GA performances caused errors when trying to select seats during attempted sales.

WebHub

Add new PB font/icons

Add in new font & CSS to adjust the appearance of the icons.

Monitor: Live Tile for Production Details

Add a widget and live tile for production summary stats, similar to the desktop.

Issue Fix: Adding a New Patron with no email address causes error

When adding a new patron without an email address it refused to create it, giving an error message.

Issue Fix: Long group names wrapping under next line on Patron relationships tab

A long group name wrapped to a new line and showed under the next line.

Create Encryption option for Pooler

Support communicating with an encrypted SQL server, and be able to continue to be used by clients with unencrypted connections.

Issue Fix: Re-order classic Google Analytics operations

The 'classic' Google Analytics had the order of operations in the wrong order, which affected the code operating correctly.

Issue Fix: Problems applying discount when few remaining seats

When there are no remaining seats left and we load up the cart to check what the discount is, there are no remaining seats in the discount, so it can't apply the discount to any seats.

Issue Fix: Products not displaying after being linked

Products linked to productions would show on the relevant purchasing page.

This appears to be a problem with the restriction setting on the perfs selection when applying the product to the production on the Page Styling. If you select "No restrictions", the product doesn't show, but if you select "Restrict to following perfs" and select one or all perfs the product displays in the purchase process.

Issue Fix: Database size detection wrong

500 internal server error when trying to connect to skins and hq. DB sizes needed to be detected in order to fix this issue.

Issue Fix: Error "There´s more than a cart for that sale"

A customer reported the above error as occurring when attempting to resend email confirmation from the WPC.

Automatic membership renewal email reminder

There are all sorts of reasons a patron might lose their print-at-home ticket. Now a patron can log into their personal account from your PatronBase website, and under Your Details they can inspect their Sales History. They can select a sale, and at the bottom of the sale details is a new button Send Receipt. This will trigger a resend of the original confirmation email, allowing them to reprint their ticket.

SNS for Amazon email

There is a new panel in Web Control Panel > Utilities which shows emails that have been sent through SES. You can then open up an email and view its details.

Automatic Membership Renewal Reminder Email

Web Control Panel now includes the capability to automatically send reminder emails to patrons whose memberships are about to expire. You can choose how many days in advance of the expiry the message will be sent. To keep a record of what reminder emails are sent, you can specify an email address that will be copied on all sent messages. You can choose to send reminder messages for all member categories, or only a selected subset.

You can customise the text sent in the email, or even create a new translation for the text. Placeholder codes {first_name}, {last_name}, {expiry_date}, {membership_description}, {phone_number}, and {org} are replaced with appropriate details, and {renew_your_membership_link} is a link into the system behind the text “renew your membership”.