Tech Update 4.2 - Youth Pages, Pre-ordering Books, and more

Since our update last summer, we've been working on many small improvements to our website, including a re-organization of our youth web pages, improvements to the process for pre-ordering and backordering books, and many small upgrades for our members and volunteers. We also have an update on our technology partnership with the CMC (Colorado Mountain Club).

Youth Programs

• With the significant growth of our youth programs, we reorganized and added to our youth web pages so that parents can more easily find programs for their children based on their location and age. A big thanks to youth staff for championing the effort and creating all the content on the new pages! And a big thanks to all of our youth staff and volunteers who introduce youth to the great outdoors.

Books

• We improved the process for pre-ordering and backordering  books on our website. We added some features that were missed in the original implementation, including allowing promo code use, automating the member discount, and the ability to choose quantities greater than one. To better meet the desire for a unified shopping cart that makes shopping easier, we combined pre-order and backorder process with in-stock shopping cart. Originally, pre-ordering and backordering books was done one title at a time. Now pre-ordered and backordered books are added to the shopping cart along with in-stock books, memberships, courses, etc.
  
  
• We improved in-store/in-person/curbside shipping option so that its less probably someone will to choose this option when they don't live near our Seattle Program Center.
  
  
• We added U.S. Territories and Military States to our USPS shipping options to offer decreased shipping costs to those in our military and who live in U.S. Territories.

Members

• We improved the preferences section of the My Profile page to make it clearer that it's  a display of your choices and changing them requires editing your profile. Prior to this update, checkboxes and data entry-style boxes were used to convey preference data, which made it appear that preferences could be edited directly on the My Profile page rather than needing to click the edit button.
  
  
• We moved the carpool preferences to the My Profile preference section to make carpooling info easier to find and improve the view of the My Profile page.
  
  
• We reorganized the profile edit form to better group some items and to match the improved preferences view so it's clearer and more consistent.
  
  
• We improved the "Who will manage this account?" field for families by adding "This account is for an adult" as a choice. That makes it clear whether  the person being added to the family membership is an adult partner or a child.

Volunteers

• We added branch council positions to rosters (e.g. Branch Chair, Branch Treasurer, etc.) so that volunteers who manage our branches can be better identified on the branch roster.
  
  
• We added the ability to bulk assign volunteer hours to participants  on an activity roster. We did this mostly to better facilitate assigning the  Stewardship Credit badge, but suspect it can and will be more widely used for things like leadership training. Look for the "Check this box to assign volunteer hours to participants too" checkbox just below the "Volunteer Hours" bulk entry field when closing an activity. Learn more about scheduling and managing activities.
  
  
• We improved the website load speed for leader-aggregated feedback and set the default page display to filter by the "Last 12 months" instead of "Lifetime." That speeds load time tremendously for leaders with lots of feedback. The "Lifetime" filter will still take a long time to load, so we recommend viewing feedback in smaller date ranges.
  
  
• We improved the award badge rosters by concerting the "+Add person to roster" from a  text link to a button link, like it is on all other rosters, and fixing  the roster download feature which was broken and gave an error when a roster download was attempted.
  
  
• We fixed the folder contents view so that the folder contents view is "sticky" as you navigate up and down the folder structure, meaning you will always see them. This should improve navigation for leaders.

Infrastructure

• We added the ability to edit form submissions and set the browser back button to edit the form when viewing a new submission to prevent duplicate form submission and to allow members and guests to edit their submissions.
  
  
• We added double-click prevention to the "submit" button on all of our forms to prevent multiple submissions. This was a feature that got "lost in the shuffle" of the Plone 5 upgrade that the launch in May 2021.
  
  
• We fixed the file type icons display so that the icons for files that may be downloaded from our website are displayed rather than the words that describe them.

Routes & Places

• We improved route/place search results view by removing the detailed information that was at the right of the listing and displaying the entire summary. Our Routes & Places have grown to be more flexible and include many options and variations. This allows us to add that information in a  way that is visible without needing to view the entire route/place.

CMC Technology Partnership

In Tech Update 4.1 we shared that we established a partnership agreement to share our website technology with the Colorado Mountain Club (CMC). We have helped them set up their new website on our platform. They plan to launch their new website late this summer.

Our design includes a shared code base that will allow The Mountaineers and CMC to share the cost of adding new features, making improvements, and fixing common bugs. We have already completed and launched one shared project: improvements for pre-ordering and backordering books. We are working on and plan to launch new features for our events system this June. These new features will allows us to sell tickets to events on our website, allow event participants to self-organize carpools like they can for activities and lodge stays, and will improve the event view so that information about the event is better organized and easier to find.

Learn More

Interested in learning more about our technology and infrastructure?  You can read all of our related blogs on our Technology Blog. We especially encourage you to read How We Prioritize Technology Feedback and Projects, and then check out our feedback website to see what else we're working on.