Blog posts
Product Updates
Product Updates
Product Update: August 2022
David Simpson
August 1, 2022
You can now generate a QR code for any form in Beacon. Open up your smart phone camera and scan the code, and you'll be sent to the page for that form. Simple as that! The QR code will download as a simple .jpg image file which you can pop anywhere you would like people to scan their way to your Beacon form.
Remember, a QR code is nothing magical! It's just a way to visit a web page without having to type it into your browser. When you boop a bar-code on your Sainsbury's loaf (other supermarkets are available) the bar-code just provides a unique ID for that product. When you use your phone to scan a QR code, it just provides the website for your Beacon form.
If you're a Beacon Admin you can head over to Settings > Record Types and you'll see a summary of the number of custom fields across your Beacon account.
If you select a record type, you'll see a summary of all of the custom fields that are being used in that record type - this makes it really easy to see where your field limit is being used.
Sometimes we all just need to slow down for a moment. You can now pause the Beacon loading page if you need more time to read the loading quote, or if you want to grab a screen shot to inspire your team! Just hit the pause button under the quote.
One for the real Beacon nerds: you can now use the Beacon API to list recently run exports and to download the results. The new Exports endpoint provides details of the exports that have been run along with a short-lived URL which can be used to download the results of the export.
More detailed information can be found in the Beacon API documentation.
You can't trigger a Beacon export from the API yet. But all in good time, API fans!
The Beacon product team (and, indeed, the whole organisation!) has moved to a four-day work week. Our goal is to be just a productive within this time and to keep up the same pace of product development that we've always taken great pride in. You can find out more about why we're doing this in this blog post.
If you're looking to really get to grips with Beacon then you can enroll in one of our free online courses through Beacon Lighthouse. We've recently added Deep Dive courses on Major Gifts & Grants and Events & Ticketing, all curated by Senior Customer Success Manager and Lighthouse Keeper, Luke.
Beacon customers are invited to join our private Facebook Group. It's a place to exchange ideas, tips, and best practices.
You can find the group here and we'd love to welcome you in.
The group is only available to Beacon customers.
We're currently in the final stages of Beta testing our new Enthuse integration - expect a release announcement in September! We're also about to release our new Relationships feature. After that, we're going to be making some pretty significant updates to forms, including pre-populating forms from URL fields, conditional fields/sections, and customisable fonts.
