Milestone: Onny is scheduled for release in May 2024. Significant changes are as follows:
🖼️ Inline Images
You can now add inline images to news items, wiki pages, and emails from Comms simply by drag-and-dropping the files or copy-and-pasting their contents from your computer right into the visual editor, just as you would with a word processor. Administrators can use the Admin > Inline Images panel to see what images their volunteers have shared in this manner and, if necessary, retroactively revoke access to them (in a similar manner to the way they already could for attachments to Comms emails).
Inline images are limited in size to no more than 4MB and are further downscaled for display; if you want to share full-resolution/print-ready images you should still continue to use the Filestore or other tools.
📝 Wiki improvements
Wikis have seen a wealth of modernisations/improvements, including:
- Support for modern “double-square bracket” style wiki links (e.g.
See the [[Fundraising report]]orThis was [[Fundraising report|already reported on]]), similar to those used in MediaWiki (e.g. Wikipedia), - The ability to pin “key pages” to the right-hand side of each wiki, to provide quick-links to essential content,
- Retention of old versions of modified pages for up to a year, allowing to to see when changes were made, roll-back changes, and undo deletions, and
- A new, easier-to-use interface/design, including a “Create a new page” button to easily make new pages without first having to make a link to them.
📧 Weekly Digest Changes
Weekly Digest emails, which volunteers can subscribe to in order to get a weekly summary of important information from their organisation, have had several organisation-managed configuration options added:
- Organisations can now choose which day each week their Weekly Digest is sent out. Choosing a day other than the default of Monday might better suit your organisation’s calendar; it will also likely result in your emails arriving sooner (emails are queued to leave the Three Rings server, so choosing a popular day like Monday can delay your digests being sent).
- The ability to vary the period covered in the digest for shifts, future gaps, and upcoming events, or even omit future gaps and events entirely.
📨 Email option on the Daily Manifest report
You can now email selected volunteers from the Stats > Daily Manifest Report. This makes it much easier to email volunteers on a particular day or multiple shifts on the same day.
📎 Comms “Attachment Warning”
When sending email from the Comms tab, if you use keywords like “attached”, “attachment”, or “enclosed” in your message but don’t add an attachment to the email, Three Rings will pop up a warning to remind you to add an attachment (in case that’s what you meant to do).
✅ Volunteer Checkbox Tools / Bulk Volunteer Updating
On the Directory, Stats reports, and elsewhere, lists of volunteers with checkboxes alongside each now feature several new controls. These allow you to:
(a) Select “ranges” (i.e. tick two volunteers and have Three Rings select those between them too) or,
(b) “Invert” your selection (i.e. select those you don’t want to act on and then invert to those you do).
These tools can be especially useful when using Comms to email volunteers based on the value of a Property on their Directory page, when bulk-purging slept accounts, among other uses.
You can also use this to “bulk-update” Volunteers: from the Directory, check the checkboxes of several volunteers (optionally after sorting them and/or using “ranges” and “invert” to help). Then click “Bulk-Update Volunteers” to set a property of all of them simultaneously. This could be useful to e.g.:
- Update a training date of all volunteers who were signed up to a specific shift
- Clear the interviewer notes made against all current volunteers with the “Applicant” role, before promoting them to “Trainee”
- Changing the expectation/commitment stored against a subset of volunteers simultaneously
🔍 Search Improvements
The built-in search tool is now faster, with clearer output, and supports searching of news items.
🌟 Starchart Enhancements
For organisations that use starcharts on Directory pages: starcharts now provide a summary at the bottom totalling-up the number of hours, shifts and points that are reflected in the starcharts as-shown. If you’d rather not have this functionality, of course, it can be disabled via Admin > Features (e.g. if your organisation’s rotas contain shifts that are not directly-comparable to one another).
🥳 Customisable Event Types
The list of “types” of events and their emoji/icons can now be customised via Admin > Event Types.
🐞 Bugfixes and Minor Improvements
- News on the Overview page is now available as an RSS feed, facilitating integration with third-party systems
- Improved the layout and instruction text on the Admin > Shifts panel
- You can change the ‘today’ colour on the rota in Admin > Themes
- Added Properties for Postcode and Travel Requirements
- Fixed minor bug with displaying apostrophes in browser tab titles (sometimes seen in the names of volunteers with apostrophes in their names)
- Improved accessibility of parts of the heading cascade (helps users of assistive technologies like screen readers to find their way)
- Added backend tools to empower Three Rings’ support team volunteers to provide faster help for a wider range of common problems
- Support for the latest anti-spam standards, allowing mail providers to provide “one-click unsubscribe” features
- When using a Key (to gain extra permissions or to bypass timeouts), this is recorded in Admin > Logs
- Localised dates/times based on your organisation’s timezone in more places throughout the system
We’re remain endlessly thankful for people who get in touch to suggest improvements to Three Rings.