Features & Improvements
We hired a new developer. His name is DEVon. A little too on-the-nose if you ask me. If anyone out there can find his birth certificate and send it in, some of us here would just like to know... the working theory among the Support reps is that he gave that name to increase his chances of landing the job. This has happened to us before, but it worked out: in 2012 we hired someone named Web-based SIS Stevenson, which seemed suspicious. We called his mother and she gave up the goods—it turns out his real name is Josh From Populi. So... we'll see about DEVon the developer.
Just in time for you to wait to use it until this time next year, we've released an FVT/GE report in Financial Aid > Reporting. The report speeds up your review of the relevant data required by the FVT/GE regulations and provides exports formatted for the SAIG and NSLDS submittals.
One of the developers made it so Populi can ingest ISIR files for 2026-27.
A different one added Invoice Due Date as a variable in Invoice Posted automations, so you can automagically tell students when an invoice is due.
Bugfixes
There's a commonly-used screen reader called JAWS, which just sounds awesome. It works by lurking just underneath the surface of the Populi UI, hunting down things called aria-labels that identify interface elements for screen readers. Then it breaks the surface, opening its mouth to read the screen aloud to the user with what I hope is a very sharky voice. Anyway, some JAWS users reported that the voice wasn't reading various items in Data Slicer and Academic Term > Info. They were missing labels! We chummed the waters of Populi Sound with the missing labels and JAWS has been sated.
For now.
The uppity little Superterm Only checkbox on SAP policies was refusing to be unchecked. But around here, if you get uppity, you get bopped on the head.
Students with a negative total FISAP income amount were being excluded from the FISAP report. We included them back in.
The Online Payments report had a broken date filter. Now it has a fixed date filter.
Same Online Payments report, different nonsense: Authorize.net test transactions were being marked as Paid/Approved even if your school's Authorize account was still in test mode. We replaced the lies with a message about the test mode situation.
Course calendar events just threw an absolute fit and refuse to be edited if there was an apostrophe in the event name. Yup, they got uppity.
Online donation notifications were broken. Online donation notifications are fixed.
The Read Online link for Library resources was popping up even if only a preview of the resource was available online. Now it should only appear if the entire resource is available.
Videos and Focus Sessions
The air outside is getting downright brisk. Curl up next to a warm laptop next week and get in on a Focus Session:
- Introduction to Populi: Cozy up and learn about setting up your Populi account, logging in, adding new users, login approvals, roles, search, basic reporting, Populi's global settings and so on. This will be most useful to Populi Account Administrator and Academic Admin users. It's scheduled for October 7th, 2025, 11:00 AM Pacific time.
- Introduction to Academics: Leaves are falling and academics needs some setup. This one covers academic years, terms, programs, degrees, the course catalog, course instances, enrollment and so on. This will be most useful to Registrar and Academic Admin users. It's scheduled for October 9th, 2025, 11:00 AM Pacific time.
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