Apple
If you use a Mac and the Safari browser (the default browser on a Mac) and you are in Australia, you may have noticed that Sunday 4th October was repeated . This was due to various terrible bugs in Safari in regard to daylight savings time. Other browsers running on Mac don't have this problem, and no browsers (Safari included) have a problem on Windows. Thanks Apple.
Actually the booking system doesn't need to know about time zones and daylight savings, because it only deals in dates. Browsers try and be helpful with time zones but it's a complication we don't need. So we re-wrote the matrix (step 1) to use UTC (formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time). This is the only time zone guaranteed never to have daylight savings. As always when we make major changes, there can be bugs we didn't find, so let us know and we will fix quickly.
BTW, Safari's problem was when adding 1 day to draw up the matrix, it forgot that Sunday 4th has 25 hours. So we got two Sundays. It's possible that the same bug appears on an iPad when using our touch-screen booking pages. If you see this, please loan us your iPad for a couple of days and we will fix it.
Paypal
Paypal has advised/reminded all merchants to check they are ready for the imminent upgrade to Paypal's digital certificate. We have checked and tested the Ski Lodge booking system to make sure it is ready.
Features
You can now upload a spreadsheet (CSV) file into the membership database. This can be used to create new members in bulk, or to update existing members. It's still in test mode, so that page asks you to send your spreadsheet to us so we can check it. It's already saved us time when setting up new clubs, and it may save you time if you need to do a bulk update e.g. of a custom field in your member database. You can update member classes by using the title of the memberclass too.
A small change - the reminder invoice (most clubs send this 7 days after the booking is made, some send it X days before the booking starts...), in the former case, is now sent X days (your setting) after the first invoice is raised for the booking. This fixes a problem when a waitlisted booking is made tentative, the invoice is raised at that time and the reminder needs to go out X days after that, not X days after the booking was created.
Other than that, since our last newsletter we fixed numerous small bugs, fixed up time zones for places not using Australia/Sydney (we wish we had used UTC from the start...) and perfected the voucher system.
We are about a week off releasing the enhanced room allocation page. This is mainly for book-by-bed lodges (i.e. lodges that show as a single row on the matrix, don't be confused if your lodge shows every bed as a row - you are book-by-room despite appearances). However for book-by-room lodges this will, for the first time give you the ability to share more than one booking into a room. Specific beds are allocated within the room and these will show on the printed report that you post on the lodge noticeboard.
 |