HandsOn Connect DocumentationAnnouncements and Release NotesRelease NotesRelease Notes 2019HOC 3.0.7.10 Release (Jan 10, 2019) and HOC 3.0.7.11 Release (Jan 24, 2019)

HOC 3.0.7.10 Release (Jan 10, 2019) and HOC 3.0.7.11 Release (Jan 24, 2019)

These two releases have implemented a number of 'under the hood' improvements to improve speed and performance in HOC. They include technical improvements to the Listing Block, ARS, forms, and overall speed and reliability of HOC public sites.  Here are some of the highlights in this month's releases.

Greater clarity during team signups for opportunities (HOC3-8652)

Various customers have indicated that sometimes, during team signup for opportunities, a team captain accidently signs up all their team members, without meaning to.  In other cases, the team captain only signs themselves up (not realizing they need to select the team members they also wish to sign up).

To help the team captain to catch mistakes like this, the following behavior is now introduced during team signup for opportuniities.

1) When a team captain selects all their members a popup will appear and say:

"You are about to register all XX of your team members for this opportunity. If this is not correct, please cancel and unselect the team members that are not attending."

2) When a team captain selects a subset of their members the popup willsay:

"You are about to register XX of your team members for this opportunity. If this is not correct, please cancel and select (or unselect) the team members that are attending (or not)."

3) When a team captain selects no members (or only themselves as captain) the popup will say:

"You have not selected any of your team members for this opportunity. If this is not correct, please cancel and select the team members that are attending."

These popups will make sure that the captain is aware of how many team members they are signing up, and give them the opportunity to confirm the signup before proceeding -- or cancel and correct their mistake!

 

Additional customization available for Opportunity Detail Page (HOC3-8753)

In previous releases we made it possible to edit the text in the sign up and express interest buttons.  However, people opting to use alternate language for 'sign up" such as :"Book your Spot" instead of "Sign Up" - noted that even though the button text changed, the header on the page above the date still said "Sign Up" or "Express Interest"

Now you can edit that text as well:

In the CMS go to Blocks / System Forms / Opportunity Detail Page and you can change the default text for both the 'section' and the Button:

 

As before, we remind you that if you opt to change "Sign Up" and "Express Interest" on the opportunity sign-up page, you should also consider updating all the other places (such as your email templates) that currently use that language - and make it consistent with your custom terminology.  Email templates, by default use the terms 'Sign Up" and "Express Interest" but can be edited to match your revised terminology.

Ability to have more than one ARS workflow for Volunteer Registration and Organization Registration (HOC3-8519)

While there can only be one active ARS workflow for Volunteer or Organization Registration - what do you do if you want to start building an alternate ARS workflow, without affecting the one that is already in use?

Up to now, there was no way to handle this.  But now, its possible to create multiple ARS workflows for Volunteer and Organization registration.  (One would be currently active, and another might be in development and testing by you.   Or you seasonally want to have a different process for registering volunteers)

You can now create multiple workflows if desired -- and must specify which one of them is the active workflow.  

By default, if you are using ARS right now, your existing workflow has been selected as the active workflow.   There is now a checkbox in the workflow configuration page where you indicate that a given workflow is active.

When its the active workflow - it appears in the CMS menu list with a Star next to it.  

If you activate a registration workflow, it will deactivate whichever workflow had currently been active. Only one workflow can be active at a time.

If you deactivate all workflows, so that none are active, you are turning off ARS and the standard registration process will be active.

Improvements to Facebook Meta tag behavior (HOC3-8346)

Users are now able to set facebook open graph metatags that will be used for facebook sharing of any HOC system pages including the Home Page.  All system pages (which previously could not be tagged, will inherit their OG tags from the sitewide settings in the CMS.   (Note:  Opportunities and Special Events shared on Facebook will pull their description from the first words of the opportunity description or can have custom tags added to the /opportunity page in CMS / Content / Pages which will override the usual default.

To set new defaults for your sitewide social sharing tags to be used when sharing system pages, In the CMS go to AddOns / Sitewide Settings, and then populate any or all of the og: tags you wish to use site wide.  

To set your image:  Upload an image (usually your logo in square format)  into the CMS - get its URL - and put the URL in as og:image.  Then click "Add Meta" to enter it.  See the tip below for more details on choosing the right og:image size for your needs.

To set your Description: Put the text you wish to appear in og:description.  

To set your Site Name -- enter the name of your site as og:site_name

Be sure to Save Settings after entering your metatags:

Then - Scrape facebook to bring in the new values if you want the update to take place as soon as possible.

Go to https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Enter the URL of a home page or system page on your site and click on "Scrape Again" so Facebook starts using the new image and description you've added in Sitewide Settings.

Tips on selecting your og:image

For Facebook sharing, Facebook recommends that the og:image used should have the following characteristics:

For Square Images

  • The image must be at least 200 x 200. Otherwise it won't display on Facebook.
  • For square logos as your og:image,  we find that 300 x 300 is a good general size to use.
  • Square Images that are 600 pixels or wider, are likely to be displayed in landscape mode - and will be cropped to a 1.9:1 ratio.  So if you use a large square image - choose one that will look OK when cropped in this way.

For landscape images:

  • Use images that are at least 1200 x 630 pixels for the best display on high resolution devices. At the minimum, you should use images that are 600 x 315 pixels to display link page posts with larger images.
  • Images can be up to 8MB in size. Try to keep your images as close to 1.91:1 aspect ratio as possible to display the full image in News Feed without any cropping. If your image is smaller than 600 x 315 px, it will still display in the link page post, but the size will be much smaller.

Multiple og:images

  • the og:image tag you set in the sitewide settings will be used for your Home page, and System pages throughout HOC.
  • You can set a different og:image tag that will be used whenever sharing an opportunity detail page by setting a separate tag in Content / Pages /  on the page /opportunity.  You cannot set different images to be used on different opportunity pages.  (the og:description for each opportunity page will be the first sentences of your opportunity description, unless you choose to set an og:description tag to be used on all opportunity detail pages.

Other sites that use the og:image tag - may crop and display your image differently. The guidelines above are how Facebook handles the tag.  

To learn more about og:image, the challenges on selecting the correct image to use, and how the tag is used when sharing links on a variety of  Internet sites — see this article:

https://iamturns.com/open-graph-image-size/

Support for multi-lingual Facebook meta tags (HOC3-8536)

Multilingual sites can now set separate metatags for each language.  So that when sharing to Facebook from your site in English, English metatags are used, and if viewing your site in Spanish, Spanish Metatags are used.

On pages and settings with meta tag capability, you can select and set tags for each language:

 

 

Bug Fix: Title of Image Block not appearing as expected (HOC3-8632)

The issue where the Title was not displayed as expected in an image block has been resolved.

Bug Fix: Sharing Portal administratively created connections made for logged in user instead of contact (HOC3-8787)

A temporary issue, where administratively creating a connection in the sharing portal created the connection for the logged in user instead of the selected contact has been resolved.

Kiosk Bug Fix: (HOC3-8795)

There was a bug discovered in the check-in kiosk, wherein a contact logging in who had a connection in either pending, waitlist or declined status, was successfully checked in (as expected when guests are enabled),  however, the attendance status remained at 'please verify' instead of "Attended"

The hours were logged, but the attendance status was not updated to reflect that attendance had been reported.  This has been corrected.

Bug Fix: Record type of a registering volunteer (HOC3-8798)

For organizations that have existing contacts of various contact record types - it was discovered that a contact registering via the public site - was having their record type updated to record type = volunteer.  Existing record types will now be preserved, so that if you are using multiple contact record types - the existing record type will not be updated via the registration process.

Improvement in display of custom fields in sharing portal (HOC3-8511)

For HOC customers who have requested the display of custom fields for objects in the sharing portal (Contacts, Connections, Volunteer Opportunities or Occurrences), this had previously been implemented for them by displaying the additional custom fields on a separate page for that object.  The user had to click on 'next' to see the additional fields)

Now -- additional custom fields - when implemented in response to a request for sharing portal customization, will appear on the same page as the standard fields under a section heading "Additional Information.  No need to click on a next button to see all the fields!

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