Courtyard Blog

Custom Fields

Austin Taylor — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:26:43 -0500

Happy New Year from Courtyard! We've just rolled out one of our most requested features ever: custom fields. Whatever data you want in your directory, from wedding anniversaries to twitter handles, can be configured from a new section under the Settings tab. We have a list of common fields that you can choose from, or you can define your own. You can even create multiple choice fields with custom options.

Custom fields can be defined either at the family level, or at the individual level. You can also make certain fields only on adults, or only on children, as needed.

Along with that, we have added support for private fields. You can now control who can view each field–either all members, admin + owner, or admin only. You can also control who can edit each field–either admin + owner, or admin only. This gives you quite a few options if your staff wants to store extra information in the directory.

Note that these fields are only available on the website right now. We are planning to push them out to the iPhone and Android apps in the future.

For a more detailed walkthrough, see the new help section on custom fields. We think this will make your online directory a lot more useful. We can't wait to see what you guys come up with!

New Look & Coming Updates

Paul Nicholson — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 01:12:36 -0500

Have you checked out our brand-new site design? We're really happy with the fresh, new look and hope that you love it too. In the coming weeks, we'll be announcing a special package for chaplains of our armed forces. Our package will offer our service at a discounted rate and will be tailored to fit the needs of those protecting our freedoms. And since you've asked, we're about to deliver- our iPhone app is being updated to allow for viewing a larger size of member's photos. That's all for now, folks. Thank you for your continued support of Courtyard!

Mobile Access

Paul Nicholson — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:43:41 -0500

Our main goal at Courtyard is to give you quick and easy access to your directory. Our first step was allowing our customers to easily view and maintain their directories online. While this provided a lot of functionality it still limited the usefulness of the directory because you needed to use a computer. Next, we opened up a whole new avenue of access by bringing Courtyard to the iPhone and iPod devices. Today, we announce another major step in making it easier to stay in touch with your members while on the go.

Announcing Courtyard for Android! Available today in the Android Market.

Invitation Emails

Paul Nicholson — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:31:23 -0500

We have noticed that our customers have struggled with having the latest email address for some of their members. Until today, there was no indication that an invite had failed because of a closed email account or because it had bounced. I just released an update that displays the status of an invite on the family page and on the Access Control page under settings.

I hope this helps everyone in resolving why a member might not see their invite.

Credit Card Processing

Austin Taylor — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 16:06:48 -0500

We are pleased to announce the beginning of the end for Courtyard PayPal subscriptions. All new customers will be set up using a credit card, rather than a PayPal account.

Existing PayPal subscribers will continue to be billed through PayPal until they migrate their subscriptions. If you are an existing customer, you should receive an email with instructions for how to do this.

Sheltered Apps, LLC

Austin Taylor — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:28:04 -0400

We are very excited to announce that we have incorporated to form Sheltered Apps, LLC. This is a major step for us as we make our transition away from using PayPal to manage our directory subscriptions. Working with PayPal has been painful at times both for us and for our customers, and we hope to have a much better long-term solution ready in the near future.

At the same time, we have added Privacy Policy and Terms of Service documents to our website and signup process. These documents reflect the de facto standards that we have followed in the past, but make those standards clear and publicly available.

P.S. Look for some exciting mobile news in the near future.

New Feature: Statistics

Austin Taylor — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 17:28:18 -0400

We just released a new feature on our two larger subscription plans: Directory Statistics. Now, as a directory administrator, you can log on and see basic statistical information. The Statistics page is located under Settings, and contains information such as the number of members in your directory, the number of families, the number of active users, the number of children, and a variety of information about how complete your directory information is.

We hope this information will encourage you to promote your online directory with your members, and to use it more effectively.

Online Manual Released

Austin Taylor — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:24:52 -0400

We're always happy to answer the questions you have about Courtyard. But every time someone takes the time to ask a question, we know there are a number of other people who had the same question, but didn't bother to ask. This is why we decided to write an online manual for Courtyard.

We hope that this manual will help you to use your online church directory more effectively. It covers everything from signup and data import, to invitations, printing, and the iPhone app. If you can't find the answer to your question in the manual, please ask us, so that we can continue to improve.

Note that while much of the manual is concerned with directory administration, there is a whole section devoted to using the directory as a member. Please feel free to share this information with your members, so that they can get the most out of the online directory as well.

New Feature: Sections

Austin Taylor — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:30:06 -0400

Today we are launching a major new feature of Courtyard, called Sections. We've gotten a number of requests from people who want to divide up their directory into different groups. We have designed this feature in such away that it will support a wide variety of possible uses, including:

Missionaries
Former Members
Staff Members
Shut-ins
Itinerant Preachers

We're excited about the way this could expand the usefulness of your directory, by keeping more people connected. We're looking forward to seeing all the creative ways this feature will be used.

Speed Improvements

Austin Taylor — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:38:23 -0400

Over the past couple of months, we've been loading up churches with far more families than we had dealt with in the past. Because of this, we were seeing certain pages slow to a crawl, sometimes taking more than 10 seconds to load every time you clicked something. It was time to do something about it.

So I went through every page in the application and optimized the database queries so that they would load much faster. In most cases I saw improvement greater than 10x. Every page in the app should load in under a second now (with the exception of the PDF exports). The most dramatic change was on the directory listing pages, which were taking 8-12 seconds for our largest churches, and are now virtually instantaneous. We hope this will make it much easier for you to browse your church directory.

If you notice any slow pages that I might have missed, please let us know. As always, we are pleased to receive questions and suggestions at feedback@courtyardapp.com.