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Product Updates
Product Updates
Product Update: February 2020
David Simpson
February 3, 2020
We've made Beacon's documentation a whole lot easier to navigate by adding a snappy search box. You can search the Beacon guide from any article or from within your Beacon dashboard by clicking the GUIDE link in the top right of your dashboard.
The guide is a great first step for becoming a Beacon expert - and now it's even easier to find what you're looking for!
You can now carry out bulk actions (e.g. export, archive, update, merge, create related records, or exporting to mailchimp) from search results.
As part of our plans to improve timelines in Beacon we now automatically log some new things! Beacon now logs outgoing Mailchimp campaigns to all of the people who are being sent emails. You also get a couple of handy links that will take you to the mailchimp email and report for that campaign. If you want Mailchimp to log emails to your timeline you'll need to enable it first in the Apps section of Beacon.
If you do a Document merge we'll also log those details to the timeline of the people being merged.
Does what it says on the tin! You can now configure Beacon forms to allow people to upload files. This is useful for capturing things like a photo for volunteers' name badges, collecting grant applications, and even CV's for roles that you're hiring for!
This month we've done a major upgrade to Beacon's user interface to bring us up to date with the latest version of Material UI. Material UI is an implementation of Google's ever-improving style guide Material Design. This adherence to the most modern design principles and our commitment to top-notch user experience is how we keep the interface looking great and responding snappily.
You shouldn't have to put up with software that looks and feels like it was built in the 90s.
Often the improvements are subtle, for example we're starting to replace loading spinners with more modern "skeletons". Skeletons fill in the blanks while you're waiting for parts of the interface to load. You can see them at work in Beacon as the cards on the right of this page load:
You might recognise skeletons from apps like Facebook where they're used extensively:
You can read a summary of what we're going to be working on in 2020 in our recent blog post. Next month we'll be working on allowing emails to be sent from Beacon (including emailing CSVs generated from exports), improved filtering, and we'll be kicking off work on building our own ticketing platform.
Finally - a special request as we get started on building our own ticketing system. We're looking for early adopters to help guide the development of this feature. If you currently use another provider (like Eventbrite) for event ticketing then please get in touch - we'd love to give you early access to Beacon Ticketing and to find out what you need from a ticketing system.
