May 3 to May 7, 2021 Release Notes

Features & Improvements

No doubt it was a big week for software releases at other companies, but not at Populi. Here's what we kicked out the door:

The My Courses view has a Past Courses view that was limited to showing five courses. Very confusing/disconcerting to those who had taken or taught more than five courses while at your school. We added an All past courses link to help cut down on the cognitive dissonance people were experiencing.

When recurring payments or donations fail for some reason, we send folks a "ur recurring thing failed oh noes" email. Now the email includes a description of the problem; it now reads something like "ur recurring thing failed b/c ur card expired plz fiiiix".

Bugfixes

We barely even fixed any bugs this week. It's not because we're lazy—I'd say it's because you, our trusty bug-reporting users, have largely been experiencing Populi as a flawless, well-oiled, Swiss-watch level machine.

A user reported that when he reserved a building for an All-Day event on the main calendar, the facilities schedule only showed that building as in use from 12am - 12am on the day reserved. He wanted the All-Day event to show the building as in use, ahem, all day (12am-11:59pm), because his event was slated to last 24 hours, not 59 seconds (sounds like it involved sleep deprivation and togas), and because that makes more sense.

The Course > Performance Dashboard > Assigments graph wouldn't show unless you had three or more students enrolled OR you had filtered it down to a specific student OR you went backward or forward in time to an era in which the graph was working properly.

Slow week: On COD submissions, we were checking to see if a school was in the U.S. or Canada, if not then we were adjusting the timestamp from the school’s local timezone to Populi’s timezone. About a month ago, the check we used to determine who was in the U.S. was altered to group other countries in with the U.S. for tax reasons. So we effectively stopped adjusting the timezone for COD submissions for places like Guam and COD started rejecting them because Guam then had a future date that was a few hours ahead of COD’s internal clock.

Videos

Our original video on the Data Slicer spawned a slew of sequels: 2 Data 2 Slicer, The Data Slicer Rises, D4T4 Slice4: Infinity Drop-down, and now finally the last installment: Data Slicer V: The Columns Strike Back.