Manual: Versions-Version 4.8

May 2012

Version 4.8 is an incremental upgrade of the RidgeStar Interactive Site incorporating new concepts and features in the base 4.0 system, as described below:

1. Twitter Interface

Authorized Users (Administrators, ...) can see and place entries (Tweet) into a Site related Twitter Feed. Event Descriptions can be Tweeted and Bulk Mail mechanisms can generate Twitter Direct Messages to individual Users.

2. iCalendar support

This feature adds the ability for the Site to be able to generate ICS (Internet Calendaring and Scheduling) support to the Calendar function. Visitors to the site can Subscribe using a suitable desktop Ciient (Outlook, Lightning, iCalendar, etc.) and dynamically retrieve Calendar related events from the Site.

3. Timeout Warning

This feature causes each private page delivered from the Server to the Browser (the Client) to contain a bit of Java code that will popup on the Desktop just before the Server session times out to warn the desktop user of the upcoming Timeout. See Manual: Settings-Timeout for configurable aspects associated with the Feature.

4. PCI Standards

This feature adopts and conforms to processing standards required by the PCI Security Council (a consortium establishing minimum processing requirements to safely accept and process credit card transactions). This includes XSS Safeguards, restricts the use of certain special characters as a portion of INPUT form processing, etc. The safeguards are specifically designed to thwart hacker efforts to take advantage of common exposures in HTTP architecture, as implemented on the Web.

5. Bulk (E)Mail has been renamed to Broadcast

BulkMail is now identified functionally on the site as Broadcast (instead of Bulk Mail). This re-purposing is in recognition of the increasing use of different forms of Communication between the Chapter and Membership. In addition to traditional Internet Email, site based Mail, Text Messaging, RSS Feeds, etc. can also be used by the targeted Recipients to receive Chapter information. Thus, the name Broadcast has been adopted to describe a more generalized verb that represents "communicating with the targeted Recipients".

7. Feature=Translate now uses Microsoft Translate

Translate has been changed from Google's Translate to Microsoft (Bing) Translate. This was forced by Google's removal of public website translation capability from their offering (terminated in December 2011)

8. CSS Sprite for performance improvements

Feature=Sprite activates logic to utilize CSS (Cascade Style Sheet) to display the familiar 16x16 pixel symbols used to represents characteristics, roles, and actions. Instead of displaying individual graphical files, one larger file is referenced and various 16x16 pixel elements are extracted from it (reducing the number of files that must be retrieved from the Server which, in turn, speeds up retrieval of the pages and reduces site response time)

9. Individual RSS Feed expanded to include Assignor alerts

Feature=RSS sites with the individual feed active will now find the Assignor Alerts included in the Feed.

This version of the system is complete and available to existing Clients (contact your account rep).

Enjoy!

- The Development Staff