Developer Diary #12

21/07/26

This is a big one, and a bit of a mixed bag.

Two substantial new areas land in this release. The first gives the Almoner, and the welfare side of Lodge life, a proper home in the system. The second is a brand new Forms engine that lets you build, send and track your own forms and Member returns. On top of those, a good number of the most-voted items from the Feature Board have made it in too.

With changes of this size, I fully expect the odd rough edge to slip through the net. Please do log in, have a good look around, and let me know if you find anything that isn't behaving.

Looking After the Brethren: Tools for the Almoner

The Almoner's work is some of the most important a Lodge does, and some of the easiest to lose track of. It tends to live in one person's head, or in a notebook nobody else can see. This release gives it a proper, private home.

In truth this one was born out of a sad situation a Lodge shared with us, where a Brother was quietly going through a great deal at home and the Lodge simply did not know until much later. The aim of everything below is to make the people who need looking after a little less likely to slip through the cracks.

A Welfare Tab on every Member

Open any Member and you'll find a new Welfare tab. It holds Welfare Events (an illness, a bereavement and so on, each dated and able to be marked resolved or re-opened as things change), a record of Support & Disbursements, and Family & Emergency Contacts.

Support and disbursements are not only about money. The amount is optional, so you can log a hamper, some flowers or a hospital visit just as easily as a charitable payment, with a note of what was given or done.

Family & Emergency Contacts, done properly

You can now record a Member's partner, next of kin and emergency contacts against their record, so that if the worst happens the Lodge knows who to reach.

Because this is information about people who are not themselves Members, each contact carries a consent status, recorded and dated, so you are holding those details on the right side of GDPR. Removing a contact deletes it outright, with nothing left lingering in the background.

A dedicated Almoner permission

Welfare information is sensitive, so it sits behind its own new Almoner / Welfare permission. You can give a Brother the Almoner role and they will see the welfare records and nothing else they shouldn't. An Almoner naturally needs to see Member details and the Reports area to do the job, so that access is granted automatically alongside the role, without opening up editing or anything else. Just as importantly, welfare data stays out of the ordinary Member exports and the general search, so it does not leak to Delegates who have no business seeing it.

Wedding Anniversaries

There is now a wedding anniversary field on the Member's Basic Info tab, and a report listing anniversaries by the date they next fall. This one came from a Provincial Almoner, and it is a small thing that makes a real difference: a timely note at the right moment is exactly the sort of care the role is there to provide.

The Welfare Report

Finally, a single Welfare Report pulls together every open welfare case across the Lodge, along with the last twelve months of support and a running total. It is visible only to those with the Almoner permission, and gives whoever holds the collar an at-a-glance picture of who currently needs support.

Forms: Build, Send and Track Your Own

This is the part that took the real work. We were asked for an automated Almoner's report, but rather than build a single fixed form for one job, we have built a proper Forms engine that any officer can use for almost anything. You'll find it under Tools → Forms.

Building and sending a form

You can build a form from six question types (short and long text, dropdown, checkbox, date and number), mark questions required, and add help text where it's useful. A form moves through a simple lifecycle: it starts as a Draft, you set it to Accepting Responses when you're ready, and you can Stop Accepting Responses at any time.

From there you can send it to all Members, active Members, a Tag, or to any ad-hoc list of email addresses. Each person gets their own single-use personal link with an optional due date, or you can generate a general link to share by hand. Recipients don't need to log in: the form opens with your Lodge crest, checks the required answers, and shows a thank-you when they're done. A used link politely tells them they've already responded.

Members updating their own details

There's a ready-made Member Details Update template that does something Secretaries have wanted for a long time. You send it out, Members confirm their own details, and rather than writing straight to your records, their answers land in a review queue for you to approve or reject first. Nothing changes on a Member's record until you say so. It is the tidiest answer I have found to the perennial problem of everyone's contact details slowly drifting out of date.

Sensitive answers stay sensitive

Any question on a form can be flagged as sensitive, which hides its answers, both on screen and in the CSV export, from anyone who doesn't hold the Almoner permission. The emergency-contact and family questions on the Member Details Update template are flagged this way automatically, so a Member's next-of-kin details aren't readable by every Delegate with access to Tools.

Recurring returns, with chasers

Any form can be put on a recurring schedule: sent out monthly or weekly, to a Lodge office such as the Almoner, to named Members, or to a set of email addresses, with a due date and automatic chaser reminders if it isn't returned in time. A tracker on the form shows you at a glance who has submitted, who is still awaiting, and who is overdue, with a CSV export of every response.

Alerts when something needs attention

A form can also raise the alarm. Add a "critical issues" style question and nominate who should hear about it, and when someone ticks that box on submission, the people you've chosen are emailed straight away. Leave it unticked and the response simply files itself for the record. Paired with the ready-made Almoner Meeting Report template, that gives a Lodge the full loop: a monthly report going out, gentle chasing if it's late, and an immediate flag to whoever needs to know when something serious comes up.

Straight off the Feature Board

A good chunk of this release came directly from your votes. If you've not had a look yet, the Feature Board is increasingly where the roadmap gets decided.

Multiple ceremonies in one Event

You can now run more than one ceremony in a single Event, for those evenings with a double or triple, each with its own performers and an optional candidate label. Previously you were limited to one ceremony per Event, which never quite reflected how a busy Lodge actually works.

Ranks and titles for guests

Guests can now carry a Masonic prefix and rank, so their titles appear properly on table plans, place cards and Masonic lists. If your Provincial Grand Master is dining with you, he'll appear as he should rather than as a bare name.

Copying Members between Lodges

For those of you running a Lodge and a Chapter (or several units) on the system, there's now a tool to copy a Member from one to another rather than typing everything again, with the option to bring their career history across and skip anyone who's already there. You'll find it in the Member Importer under Tools.

Add Events to your calendar

Event invites and reminders now come with an add-to-calendar option: an attached calendar file plus Google and iCal links, on the emails and on the public RSVP pages, so Brethren can drop a meeting straight into their own diary.

Adding several visitors in one go

When you're adding visiting Brethren to an Event's attendance, the add form now stays open with the cursor ready for the next name, keeping what you've typed if something needs correcting, rather than closing after each one. If you're entering a dozen guests before a Festive Board, that's a dozen fewer trips back to reopen the form.

Smaller improvements

• Document previews. Individual Document pages now show a preview: PDFs open in a full-height viewer and images render directly on the page, with Open and Download buttons for everything else.
• A tidier Reports page. The five charts and the report links have been rearranged so the Specific Reports buttons are visible without scrolling. A few people were missing them below the fold.
• Event Performances now keeps your scroll position after you save, and pins the confirmation message, so you're no longer thrown back to the top of the page.

Bug fixes & ongoing work

• The Reports page could throw an error for Lodges with no active Members, because the average-age calculation had nothing to work with. It now loads normally and simply shows no average age. Fixed.
• As ever with new areas as large as Forms and Welfare, there may be rough edges I haven't caught yet. If something isn't behaving, the quickest way to get it to me is the ticket form at theworkingtools.co.uk/my-tickets, and I'll get on it.

Documentation

The documentation has been updated alongside all of the above, including a new Welfare & The Almoner section under Members and a new Forms section under Tools. The welfare pages also carry a short data protection note that your Lodge, and your Province's data protection officer, may find helpful for their own records. As always, the documentation is the best first port of call if you're unsure how something works.

What's coming next?

The next big piece is one a number of you running several Lodges have asked about: a single provincial view that lets you see across all of your units in one place, rather than dipping into each one in turn. It's a large undertaking, but it's firmly on the workbench. Alongside that I want to extend the new alerts beyond email, and keep working steadily through the Feature Board, which is increasingly shaping what gets built.

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