Welcome to the April, 2012 update, sent to all ClubExpress club and association administrators.

With this update, we are announcing Version 5.3, with many enhancements to ClubExpress, including a slideshow widget, an upcoming events widget, and the ability to subscribe to forum threads; as well as many smaller changes. There are also lots of bug fixes. Version 5.3 is not quite complete; as I promised earlier, we're working on support for discount coupons and hoping to have that done in the next 3 weeks.

Also check out the new "Support" tab on Control Panel, collecting all of our support resources in one place. We've also started adding video tutorials; 14 of them so far with many more to come.

The manual and online help system will be updated in a few days.

ClubExpress now includes two new widgets in the editor. The Slideshow widget allows you to display the photos from a Photo Page as a slideshow, while the Upcoming Events widget allows you to show upcoming events across multiple categories. Both of these widgets can be placed anywhere that the advanced content editor is used, including the home page, custom pages, and content boxes. They can be accessed using the Insert Widget button in the editor (last button on the right of the top toolbar.)

We also enhanced the existing Polls widget with new options. And all widgets as well as links in the editor now support right-clicking the mouse to display special options, such as the ability to edit the widget or link in place.

Please note however that widgets cannot be placed in emails or in forum messages.

The event registration confirmation email now includes the event location.

The system will now send a cancellation email to the primary registrant for an event that requires immediate payment if he or she registered but did not pay within the time limit.

There is now a visibility setting for event questions. You can turn off individual questions at any time without losing their data. (For example, if a T-shirt order needs to be sent to the vendor before the actual event registration closes.)

Members can now subscribe to a thread in a forum, to be notified whenever a message is posted to that thread. This option can be configured for each forum; it's turned off by default but you can enable it for any forum. It works in forums that are configured as listservers only if the member is not already receiving every forum message by email. There is also a new Profile page listing the threads to which members have subscribed and allowing them to remove these subscriptions.

We made some changes to the standard Member Directory to be more consistent in terminology and visibility, especially when clubs allow members to control their visibility within the directory.

We also made some changes to the Donations function. Now only admins can specify a donation date; for members and non-members, today's date will always be used. For admins, there is also an option to control whether a confirmation email is sent.

A number of member status and listing reports in the Membership Info group were subgroup (chapter) enabled. The Dropped member report now supports a date-range filter. There are also two new Storefront Inventory reports.

On the Website Appearance page, there is now a "Remove All" button to clear all custom CSS.

The Multi-Misc. Charges screen was updated to show members by Last Name, First Name, and also to indicate who is a primary member. The confirmation email for this function now also includes a payment link.

In the Member Manager, the Primary/Secondary/Tertiary Changes dialog now works with Prospective Members.

Also in the Member Manager, the Member Status popup for a Pending member now includes an "Activate" option to convert the member to active without the need to process a payment.

When a member is a sub-group (chapter) administrator, there were problems showing the custom web pages that the member was allowed to edit.

We improved the layout of the Event Registrations page to better fit on narrower screens. Also in events, the Add Companions button was appearing for non-members when they were not allowed to bring companions (even if members were allowed to do so.) There was a problem editing event attendee names where two or more people had the same temporary name (for example, "John Smith Guest"); editing one name would change both.

There was a problem specifying a financial account for an event and having this information retained as you went forward and backwards in the Add Event wizard. Also in events, if partial payments are enabled, the registration Immediate Payment option is now hidden. You cannot select both options at the same time.

The Bank Deposit Details report with Chapter info was not showing complete data. Also in reports, the Member Status by Expiration Date report was not properly handling members who belong to more than one chapter. The Admin Function Coordinators report was showing dropped members. The Name Tag reports for events had a formatting problem. Donations reports were not correctly displaying decimal values.

There was a problem with the "Browse" button for attachments in Forums, specifically when using IE8.

Since we added support for non-members in Committees, emailings to a committee that included non-members was not picking everyone up. Also in Committees, non-member phone and email were not being displayed correctly.

The Opt-Out page for non-members was not working in some specific instances.

As a result of recent improvements to Photo Pages, the photo page title was not being displayed correctly.

In the Storefront, there was a problem when setting the start page to Featured Items but leaving the Categories page active--clicking on the storefront jumped to Categories rather than Featured Items. And if Categories was turned off and only Featured Items was enabled, an error was triggered. Also in the Storefront, the order fulfillment process was not picking up the correct customer phone number. The status drop-down on the Inventory edit page was displaying the first item in the list as "Available" instead of the actual status. Also, the packing list was not showing Organization information. Finally, there were problems with canceling an order that included backordered items (it was adding the quantities back to inventory.)

In the Advanced Content Editor, there was a problem displaying table outlines in Preview mode.

In the event reminder process, there was a problem with date/time formatting. We also added more checks to ensure that older or expired event reminders are deleted rather than sent. There was also a problem with reminders programmed for an event that had subsequently been flagged as "Not Visible" or "Archived". There was a problem with editing the More Info page for an event generating a new set of reminder emails.

In Discussion Forums, the message token no longer appears for forums that are "online only".

In the Document Library function, there was a problem with the download counter.

When saving a vCard to your local computer from a member's bio, the Notes field was not being saved if Member Achievements had been enabled.

There was a rounding problem with some payments of $XX.95.

In the Emailings function, a distribution list based on member Interests showed the correct list of recipients but was only being sent to the sender.

There was a problem with the date picker control for birthdays and anniversaries on the Profile - Member Directory page.

ClubExpress now includes powerful new widgets in the Advanced Content Editor, to create dynamic content wherever the editor is used, especially on the home page, in common content boxes that appear on every page, and on custom pages. In addition to the Quick Polls widget that we've had for a number of months, we now also have Slideshow and Upcoming Event widgets.

To use these widgets, open the editor and position the cursor where you want the widget to be placed. Then select the "Insert Widget" function on the top toolbar, right-most button. Select the appropriate widget and complete the configuration dialog.

For a slideshow, select an existing Photo Page, one that you've built specifically for the slideshow. It's a good idea to crop and adjust the photos on this slideshow to be all the same size. You can then specify this size in the Width and Height fields. There are two options for controlling appearance: a slide viewer with a border, navigation buttons and captions; or a viewer with no extraneous controls, just the images. When you click "Save", the widget is created.

For a list of upcoming events, specify a title, the number of days "out" for the system to look (for example, 7 days or 30 days), and the width of the control. If the widget will be displayed on the home page, use a wider number such as 500px; if the widget will be displayed in a content box down the left or right side of the screen, use a narrower number such as 150px. The height will be dynamically calculated based on the number of events to be shown. Finally, specify the categories of events to be displayed. If your categories in the Event Calendar function are well defined, it will be easy to select certain categories to show (for example, racing or social events, or monthly educational programs) and hide other categories (for example, sub-committee planning meetings.) When you click "Save", the widget is created.

You can also right-click the mouse on the widget to edit or delete it. Note that some browsers allow a single right-click while others require that you first double-click to select and then right-click. Selecting the "Replace" option allows you to edit the properties of the poll, slideshow or upcoming events widget. For slideshows and upcoming events, you can also select "Refresh Data" to cause the system to go back to the database to rebuild the list of photos or events to display.

These widgets add a powerful new dimension of interactivity to your websites, making it easy to display dynamic content without programming. And keep your eyes peeled for more such widgets that we're planning to add.