Well, not technically, but it is with AddressMonster.com!

We thought that everyone needed a little pick-me-up before school begins this fall.  We’ve added a few more features to help your PTA/PTO manage the day-to-day operations of their directory.  Ready to hear what we did?

Ready?

Well, I guess it isn’t worth that much suspense, but here is what we’ve done.

1. There is a new “group” edit for your students.  When you are in the family admin screens, you can click on the menu option for “student edit” and it will take you to an alphabetically sorted listing of students.  This allows you to bulk edit your students affiliation with their parents and their teachers.  No more having to select one student at a time!
2. We now track birthdays!  Who doesn’t like that?  Now you can add birthdays to all of your students which will help maintain birthday lists and other events.
3. Email addresses and phone numbers have been added to the faculty listings.
4. A bulk delete feature has been added under the “account admin” page.  This will allow you to delete all of your students, faculty or families, just in case you want to start over.
5. Last but not least, you can now set your directory to display by class or by grade.  If your school has multiple classes for their students, then you can switch your view to “grade” under the “Account Admin” screen.  When a PTA directory member searches for students it will show the results by grade and not by class.  All you need to do is place the student in a home room in that grade and the system will take care of the rest.

Well, I hope that you find these features helpful.  We’ll keep plugging away, but keep your suggestions coming.  All of these items came directly from users of the system, so your voice counts!

Talk with you soon,

Robert
robert@addressmonster.com

Well, while I’ve been working to finish up the admin console, a request was made to allow schools to edit the home page of the “search”.  This seemed to make a lot of sense and in the end only took about 10 minutes to figure out!  Although the admin page needs a little “creative” work, you can now update the content on your own for the search page.

This will allow your school to post interesting information about the school or items that need updating right on the homepage for everyone to see!  Really useful for posting information such as links to education programs with grocery stores or other PTA partners.

Not to be outdone but that, another request was the creation of newsletters for the PTA to be able to send to all of the members or just groups such as teachers, parents etc…  We’ve been working on that and should have it ready to go in the next week or two.

Finally, we all know that open houses are going to start soon and with that, new requests for directory information will be made.  One user of the system asked that we create an “open house” screen where returning parents from the year before can update their information or new parents can quickly enter their information straight into the directory.  It will still require that someone go through and place the kids in the classes, but this should eliminate a lot of work on behalf of PTA volunteer that maintains the directory.

Other than that, keep the ideas coming.  You can always email me directly at robert@addressmonster.com!

Rob

Well, my full-time job took me away from this little project, but I’ve returned with vengence!  The administrative console is nearly complete and I think that it looks/works great.  I should wrap up the couple of remaining items by the end of the week and then we are off to see if anyone wants to use it!  We should have a little over 1000 students in the system by the middle of summer with plans to double that by the time the fall school year starts.

As always, feedback is welcome!

Rob

Who knew that it would be so time consuming to build the admin console portion.  We added some neat features like the ability to include non-family members in the committee listings.  This is great if there are faculty members that participate in the PTA committees but aren’t part of a family associated with the school.

We are just about there though.  You can no fully manage the faculty, committees, families, students and PTA members from the admin console.  Still need a few tweaks on the navigation process, but overall things are coming along nicely.

Stay Tuned.

Robert

Spent the weekend watching football (not that there was much of a game anywhere) and updating the administrative screens to help schools manage their directories.

The school directory administrator can now edit family and login information directly from the listing.  They don’t have to go to a specific admin section, rather they simply search for the student/family just like they normally would.  They’ll have an extra option to “edit” the entry right from the search results.

Easy Peezy Lemon Squeezy

One of our testers asked the question of “how can I sell advertising in the directory to help offset the expense?”.  Easy.  With AddressMonster.com, we make available traditional banner ad space at both the header and sides of the directory display.  Within your admin control panel you simply updated the banner ads that you’d like to display (presumably that you’ve sold) and then they will be randomly displayed as your visitors use your directory.

It’s that simple.  Sell an ad, upload the image, enable it in control panel.

Rob

Spent all day today working on a new authentication mechanism for the website.  Obviously the protection of this information is critically important and justified the work, but geesh, it was quite a bit.  Now each page checks a variety of different items to ensure that the person logged in is supposed to be logged in.

We also reached out to the owner of another domain that we might use for our PTA hosting needs.  Although I like addressmonster.com, there may be some that don’t.  I have no idea if we will get the name or not, but it’s worth a try.

So now we have security tightened up even more.  We’ll move on to a few other areas including the faculty and committee listings next.  I think that we’ve done about all we plan to do for the student sections in this release.