Feature Update: Newsletters

We’re excited to announce the release of newsletters. Newsletters is a tool that simplifies the process of creating email newsletters, and makes it easier to stay in contact with parents and alumni. Not only does it take fewer than 5 minutes to send out a newsletter, your newsletter will look great too. In three short steps, you’ll be able to create a newsletter that looks like the picture below.

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Our Git Deployment Workflow

Like most Rails developers, we’re using git for source control. However, our first attempt at setting up a deployment system made a huge mess so we went looking for a better way.
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Feature Update: Statistics

The point tracking system was a great idea, but we felt it wasn’t living up to its potential. Today, we’ve replaced the Point module with a Statistics interface that is easier to use and much more flexible. Take a peek below (click to enlarge):

The first thing you’ll notice is that we’re now including Attendance, Balance, and Work Hour tracking by default. Limitations in the Points system prevented it from being used for such a wide array of purposes, but now you can access everything from one standardized interface. We made several changes to make this possible.
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Caching Images Using Attachment_Fu and Amazon S3

Caching images improves the user experience and reduces S3 costs.  It improves the user’s experience because web pages load quicker and it reduces S3 costs since you have fewer transfers.
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iCal Exports for Multi-day Events

One critical feature for GoZuus is to ensure that data is available not just within the site, but also portable in usable formats.  One obvious use of this is the group calendar.  We’ve built a nice online calendar, but we’re not out to replace Google Calendar or iCal or your iPhone.  Cleanly exporting data in iCalendar format lets us feed data into whatever scheduling application our users choose to embrace, so that their GoZuus calendar works where they want it.

There’s plenty of resources online discussing how easy it is to use the Ruby Icalendar library.  However, just following those directions didn’t produce quite the results I was looking for when exporting multi-day events.  Using the directions from the previous links, Apple’s iCal app displayed every event as ending one day early.  And Google Calendar put “(12:00am?)” in front of the titles.  Not exactly seamless integration.  A quick Google search didn’t turn up anything useful, so hopefully this solution will save someone else some time.
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