Developer Diary #11

14/07/26

Since the last diary we've had the Feature Board running properly for the first time, and it has already changed how I decide what to build. Four of the items below went in because you asked for them and voted for them - including the two most popular requests on the board.

As always, please do log in and have a play around.

What's new in this release?

Round Tables on the Table Planner

Easily the most requested change on the board, and one I'd wanted for a while myself.

You can now add round tables to a Table Plan alongside the existing rectangular ones. Set the number of seats and the planner draws the table and spaces the chairs evenly around it, exactly as they'd sit in the room.

Plenty of Lodges dine at round tables - and until now you've had to approximate that with rectangles and hope the plan made sense to whoever was laying up. That guesswork has gone. You can mix round and rectangular tables in the same plan, so a top table with rounds in front of it now looks on screen like it looks on the night.

Inviting Contacts to Events

Events are no longer members-only.

You can now invite your Contacts to an Event, exactly as you would a Member - individually, several at once, or by Tag. They receive the same invitation email, respond through the same link, and appear in your attendance, dining and apologies lists alongside everyone else.

This is one of those gaps that becomes obvious the moment you hit it. Visiting Brethren, guests, the Provincial party, partners at a Ladies' Night - none of them are Members of your Lodge, and all of them need inviting and counting. Now they can be.

One thing to note: only Contacts who have an email address recorded will appear in the list, because invitations and responses both happen by email.

Searchable Documentation

The documentation has grown a great deal over the past year, which is a good problem right up until you're trying to find one particular thing in it.

There is now a search box on the documentation. Type what you're trying to do and it will take you to the relevant page. The documentation remains the fastest way to get an answer, and it's now considerably easier to actually get into.

Export your Dining List as a CSV

You can now export the Dining List for an Event as a CSV.

This came from a Secretary who runs his dining through an external planner and was rekeying the whole list by hand every month. If you work with a caterer who wants a spreadsheet, or you simply prefer to do your numbers outside the system, the list is now yours to take away.

Floor Plans: Seating Blocks and editable text

The published floor plan has had some further attention.

You can now add Seating Blocks - a block of text per table, listing that table's name and everyone seated at it, in seat order. Drop them wherever you like on the plan. Along with the existing Seat Names and Seating List options, and a choice of how names are formatted, you have a good deal of control over how a plan reads on the page.

All of that text is now editable directly on the plan. If a name needs shortening to fit, or you want to add a note to the plan itself, you can simply click and type rather than going back to change the underlying record.

Payment receipts on Invoices

When a payment is recorded against an Invoice, the Treasurer can now email the member a proper receipt. One less thing to write out by hand, and a cleaner paper trail on both sides.

Ballots: named voting links

Ballot links can now be issued against a name, and the ballot will show you who has voted.

Useful when you need to know who is still to respond so you can chase them, rather than simply watching a number tick up and wondering who's missing.

Invoices assigned to a Financial Year

Following on from the Treasurer overhaul in Diary #9, Invoices are now properly tied to a Financial Year. A closed year stays closed, and your reports reflect the period the money actually belongs to.

The Emailer during your free trial

A change of heart on this one.

Previously the Emailer was blocked entirely during the free trial - which meant one of the tools Secretaries most want to try was the one tool they couldn't. 

Trial users can now send to a limited number of recipients in any 24 hours. That's enough to send yourself a test, mail a handful of Officers, and get a proper feel for how the Emailer works before deciding whether to subscribe - rather than having to take my word for it.

The Feature Board, three months in

I want to say something about how this is going, because I think it's working.

The board has done exactly what I hoped: it has told me what matters most, rather than what shouted loudest. Round Tables and Contact invites were the two clearest signals on it, and they're the two biggest items in this release. That is not a coincidence.

It has also made me a lot better at closing the loop. Anyone who voted for a request gets told when it moves, so nobody is left wondering whether their suggestion vanished into the ether. If you voted for any of the four items above, you'll have heard from us.

So, if you've an idea, please do put it on the board. And if you haven't voted on anything, have a look at what's there. Your votes are genuinely deciding the order I build things in.

Feature Board: https://www.theworkingtools.co.uk/feature-board

Bug fixes & ongoing work

• Career events sharing the same date - an Initiation and a Passing recorded on the same day, for instance — were appearing in an arbitrary order on a member's Masonic career. They now hold the order you entered them in.
• Inviting a Member no longer throws you back to the top of the page. If you're working down a long list of Brethren, you stay where you were. A small thing, but an irritating one.
• Multiple members can now be recorded against the same role in the Role Report.
• Documents were opening in the root folder rather than the folder you were in - now fixed.
• Duplicate invoice emails, and an issue deleting a line item in the Treasurer section - both fixed.
• Date and time selectors were misbehaving on iPhone - now fixed.
• Placeholder email addresses — the dummy ones some Lodges use to fill a blank - are now stripped on import, so they can't be emailed by accident.
• Minutes documents were generating at the wrong size - now fixed.
• A round of background security hardening, particularly around file uploads.
• Page-speed work across the site - pages should feel noticeably quicker, especially on a phone.

Documentation

Documentation has been updated alongside everything above, including new pages for the Table Planner. And it's now searchable, so there's rather less excuse for either of us. If you're stuck on how something works, it should still be your first port of call.

What's coming next?

More of the same - the board is full of good ideas and I want to keep working down it. I'd expect the next release to be another spread of requested features and fixes rather than one large structural change.

As always, thank you for supporting The Working Tools. The system continues to grow because of your feedback and real-world use. If you know a Secretary in any Order who might benefit from what we're building, please do point them our way for a free trial.

More soon.

S&F,
Karl