Features & Improvements
Yo dawg, I heard you like read-only user roles, so we made you an Admissions Auditor role. This role lets you look at everything in Admissions (and Profile > Admissions), except for the stuff under Settings.
The Admissions Auditor can't do this, but other Admissions users can: you can bulk-update the academic term for leads via the Actions button on the Leads report now.
Contacts > Organizations has a new button that says Import Organizations. Puzzled by this strange new button, our crack documentation team investigated and discovered that this button lets you import lists of organizations from XLS or CSV. A full list of our findings will eventually be published, possibly on Substack, but more likely in the Knowledge Base.
The course catalog importer was refined and improved: it added support for delivery method and corequisites while also increasing its overall intelligence and reading comprehension (no more suggesting columns like "prerequisite units" when it sees "corequisite courses" in your spreadsheet, among other things).
The people importer in Contacts lets you set the Identifier field for your imported folks.
Sounds like we're an importing business. We should start importing stuff people like. Spanish olive oil and Iberico ham. Rare Irish whiskies. Japanese selvedge denim. Argentinian beef-grilling rigs. Personally, I'd love a nice Import Midleton button. It would be funny if we put that button in Financial Aid > Settings.
Okay, back to stuff we actually did, not stuff we probably shouldn't: If you click Yes on the new Enable relationship views setting in Account > Customizations, any user can view their relationships on My Profile > Info and even designate one as an emergency contact.
Custom forms for donations allow donation amounts to be used as the trigger for conditional fields. And conditional fields everywhere (Applications, Forms, etc.) can now be summoned by specific answers in number, decimal, and short-answer fields.
Added a few different notification options for students, faculty, and assignments: they can get the dingybell to light up when an assignment is almost due, when comments have been made on it, and when work has been submitted for it.
We also changed the "You've been assigned a lead/inquiry/application" emails into dingybell clangers.
Blagoslovi duche moiya Gospoda! There's a new built-in Russian localization.
Localizations now let you offer a translated "reference bounce message".
Users can post files to bulletin board posts wherever bulletin board posting is available.
Convenience fees for card payments are now available wherever you can take online payments in Populi. They're all handled on Financial > Settings > Payment Gateways under Gateway Uses.
If you run one a them IPEDS preset reports in Academics > Reporting, you can now tag them students with it.
We've given you the option to waive the form fee for a respondent before the respondent starts responding to the form.
Added a thing to make sure that former users who are now non-users don't continue to get email notifications.
In Contacts, you can now reset the ID number counters for the various kinds of ID numbers Populi can generate.
A new automation trigger will perform an action when a form response is linked to a person.
We've given Library Admins the incredible destructive power of being able to delete an entire library, location, or resource batch.
There's also a language filter for Browse Resources. Not the kind that screens out naughty words, but the kind that finds resources in a particular language. Like Urdu or Finnish or something.
And loan policies have resource hold limits now.
Respondent URL is now available via API and webhook.
Courses now backfill lesson completion data when an existing assignment or discussion is added to a lesson after students have already submitted/posted.
Maybe this sentence will mean something to you: We've updated Canvas course auditor behavior to link "Observer" to the custom Canvas "Auditor" role.
The setting that allows students to print their own aid offer letters and CFPs has been separated into two different settings.
PayFactory now exposes how much in fees have been deducted from ACH deposit payouts, so we can now show that to you in Populi.
Bugfixes
When you print an essay-type assignment, apparently the page you print now includes the text of the essay, which is an improvement over whatever it was doing before, presumably.
In Data Slicer, if you used the Print Address Labels action and selected an HTML layout, the export dialog used to lie and tell you that you could export an ODT version of that HTML file.
For test fill-in-the-blank questions, if you placed {} in there without entering the answer between the brackets (like you’re SUPPOSED TO), it wouldn’t allow the student to enter an answer there BUT (here’s the real kicker) it would still count that as one of the blanks, effectively throwing all the student’s subsequent fill-in-the-blank answers off by one.
Changing localizations was not “sticking”. Now they stick.
Fixed a smattering of mobile app issues that weren't necessarily bugs, but were definitely suboptimal (allowing autocorrect in name fields, stuff like that).
Also fixed a smattering of issues with a variety of variables in various automations.
Fixed some issues with how meeting times were displaying for courses that hadn't yet started.
Fixed a display issue for deleted courses in the Account > Changes report.
You could set up a recurring course event (on the course calendar) that would "never" end, even beyond the course end date. You can't do that any more.
The "Enable Bookstore" settings text in Account > Customizations had an outdated line that implied online payments were somehow tied to it (they were connected a loooonnnng time ago).
Smashed a bug that would let you edit Canadian donation amounts for which tax receipts had already been issued.
Videos and Focus Sessions
As October draws to a close, you should learn more about Populi:
- Introduction to Degree Audit: The leaves are falling and the trees are stark and bare. But this focus session will nonetheless cover degree requirements, course groups, course mapping, exceptions, transcripts and so on. This will be most useful to Academic Admin and Registrar users. It's scheduled for October 28th, 2025, 11:00 AM Pacific time.
- Introduction to Financial Aid: A bluster of cold wind hearkens colder months ahead. But this focus session will get into financial aid settings, awards, packaging aid, disbursements, aid applications and so on. This will be most useful to Financial Aid and Financial Admin users. It's scheduled for October 30th, 2025, 11:00 AM Pacific time.
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