Community Enterprise™
Release Notes – CE Version 5.4
 PDF Version

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
RELEASE ITEMS
1. Membership - Recurring Payments
2. Internationalization - Currency Symbol
3. Internationalization - Date Fields
4. Internationalization - Virtual Card Services gateway integraiton
5. Membership Module - Customized email confirmations & Invoices
6. Upgrade of WYSIWYG Web Editor
7. Events - New Channel - Calendar: Show All
8. User Guide Enhancement

9. Data Migration Guide and Sample Scripts
10. Transactions and Accounts Modules Enhancements
11. Web Page Rollback
12. Membership Approval - Pending Status
13. New Channel - "Donation - Fund"

14. Various fixes and enhancements
COMING SOON
1. Reports Module – Print mailing labels enhancement
2. Quickbooks Integration Enhancements
3. Blog
4. PayPal integration
  


Introduction

These release notes cover changes in Community Enterprise (CE) Version 5.4.

Release Items

1. Membership - Recurring Payments
CE 5.4 includes a recurring payments option that can be used with the Verisign Payflow Pro gateway in CE.  This feature enables administrators to set up recurring payment options related to membership types with a variety of payment features (as shown in graphic at right).  Members can then sign up for recurring payment memberships on the front end of a site during the membership join or renewal process.  In addition, administrators on the back end can also create recurring payments for members through the administrative interface.  CE integrates seamlessly with Verisign to pass recurring payment information back and forth within the two systems.  So, as subsequent payments are made, records of these payments because reportable records in CE. 

2. Internationalization - Currency Symbol
CitySoft and our partners are making significant investments in the internationalization of Community Enterprise.  CE 5.4 allows administrators to change currency symbols in the CE interface.  The administrator merely changes the currency symbol in one place in the back end of the system (as shown at right) and that change is replicated throughout all the front end and back end interfaces in CE.  This change allows international clients of CE conduct operations easily in local currency denominations. 

3. Internationalization - Date Fields
CitySoft and our partners are making significant investments in the internationalization of Community Enterprise.  Among these efforts, date fields are being internationalized in CE.  In this release, all date fields include a prompt that demonstrates how date ranges need to be entered in CE.  With this prompt, international users will be able to effectively use CE features with a date range component.  In future releases, we will enable changes to be made in the format of date ranges in CE in order to better accommodate international users.

4. Internationalization - Virtual Card Services Gateway Integration
CE 5.4 introduces an integration with international payment gateway Virtual Card Services.  This gateway integration will enable CE clients to more easily process financial transactions in international contexts.

5. Membership Module - Customized Email Confirmations and Invoices
With 5.4, CE includes a major enhancement to membership functionality.  In this enhancement, administrators can create personalized email confirmation messages and invoices that are sent to users who register for membership online. 


A confirmation email message and / or invoice (as shown in graphic at right) can include up to 20 merge fields such as first name, last name, membership type, membership join date, expiration date, and renewal date, and so forth.  Unique confirmation email messages and invoices can be sent to users who sign up for different membership types.  So, for instance, a student member could receive one type of email message and a regular member could receive a separate type.  These confirmation email messages and invoices are available for both CE individual membership and organization memberships.


In addition, when members join online, the payment will automatically generate a transaction in CE’s transaction module so that full tracking and reporting will be possible.

 

  

6. Upgrade of WYSIWYG Web Editor

 

 

CE 5.4 includes an upgraded version of the WYSIWYG web editor that is used in multiple CE modules such as Pages, Articles, Email and more.  This upgraded web editor includes a variety of fixes and new features including improved stability, improved application of styles, and improved handling of HTML templates so that it is easier to "drop in" html templates into web pages.

7. New Channel – Calendar - Show All
A new Channel has been added to CE in this release that called "Calendar – Show All."  This channel publicly displays both public and non-public events in the calendar interface.  When users without appropriate membership privileges attempt to register for a member-only event, they are diverted to a page that can display a custom message (such as a message inviting them to gain access to the event by becoming a member).  This channel is particularly appropriate for clients who wish to display member-only events to non-member users as an incentive to join the organization. 

8. User Guide Enhancement
The CE 5.4 release includes a substantial upgrade of the CE User Guide. This upgrade includes improvements in many areas of the User Guide.  These areas of improvement include the membership section, contacts import section, installation guide section, and many others.  The CE User Guide is now over 330 pages long making CE one of the most thoroughly documented software packages in its class.  

9. Data Migration Guide and Sample Scripts
The release of CE 5.4 includes a new documentation guide – the CE Data Migration Guide.  This guide is targeted primarily towards CE implementation consultants and some technically minded clients to assist them in doing complex data imports into CE.  This documentation will dramatically lessen the time and cost necessary to import complex, relational databases into CE.  This guide includes an open source library of sample scripts that can be used by CE consultants and other technical users to manage their data migration processes. Over time this script library will grow and provide progressively easier data migration to clients. 

10. Transactions and Accounts Modules Enhancements
CE 5.4 includes a large number of enhancements of the Transactions and Accounts modules in CE.  The enhancements will enable CE clients to use the system for fund accounting as well as to unify all online transactions into one series of views and reports.  The Transactions and Accounts modules also include full custom fields capabilities that will enable users to track a variety of information (e.g. notes, attached reports, etc.) related to the transaction and accounts records. 

11. Web Page Rollback 
A web page view and rollback feature is being introduced in CE 5.4.  With this feature, which is located in the Page History section of the Pages module, CE makes a copy in the database of any web page revision that is made in the CE content management system.  All these past page revisions can be viewed and “rolled back” so that they take the place of the current page at any time.  This feature will be retroactive for current CE clients so that they will be able to roll back to pages that were created since the beginning of their CE deployments. 

12. Membership Approval - Pending Status
A new membership approval feature is introduced into CE 5.4 which complements previous membership ways to approve memberships in CE.  In this feature, an administrator can choose whether new members who apply online are assigned a pending status in all scenarios or just when they select the "Pay by Check" payment status rather than paying by credit card online.  In addition to this setting, the new pending status is searchable and reportable in a variety of views and reports. 

13. New Channel - "Donation - Fund"
With CE 5.4, a new interactive channel is made available to clients.  The "Donation – Fund" channel is similar to the regular Donation channel and allows web site users to donate online.  However, this new channel allows online donors to choose a fund where they want their donation contributed.  This allows CE clients to easily provide multiple types of donations to their constituents and easily keep track of the data. 


 

14. Various Fixes and Enhancements
In addition, the Version 5.4 release includes a number of small fixes to issues in different modules including Membership, Applications, Events, Activities, Manage Your Profile, and the Reports module.

Coming Soon
The following features are in progress and will be added to subsequent releases of Community Enterprise.

1. Reports Module – Print mailing labels enhancement
A major enhancement of the mailing labels printing capability is planned for the next release of Community Enterprise. In this enhancement, a client will be able to create a report (e.g. List of recent donors) and automatically generate a printable mailing labels file from the Reports module.

2. Quickbooks Integration Enhancements
The next release of CE will include a substantial upgrade to the CE QuickBooks Connector feature.  This feature currently allows CE users to transfer transaction records such as donations, event registrations, membership payments and store purchases from CE to QuickBooks automatically.  In the enhancement to this feature, CE will be able to determine in more precise detail exactly which QB accounts are used for specific events, membership types and so forth.  This will provide the client with a greater level of control over exactly which accounts data is transferred to in QuickBooks.

3. Blog
CE will include a fully featured weblog in the next release.

4. PayPal integration
CitySoft is adding an integration to the popular PayPal Standard payment service in Community Enterprise. This integration will complement CE’s existing integration with Verisign’s Payflow Pro service and provide clients with a new, lower cost option for processing payments online.