For TAW 3.0 the attendance & events system has been completely overhauled. In this blog post we’ll explain the new features that will be coming with the release of TAW 3.0. We’ll also briefly touch on our future plans for the attendance & events system. Everything outlined in this blog post except for the future expansions section has already been implemented in the back-end of TAW 3.0, the front-end is still a work in progress.
The TAW 3.0 website will come with the option to create private events. These private events can only be seen by the members invited to the event. Apart from the fact that they are hidden to those not invited these events will function like any other event.
On the old website each event is either mandatory or optional for all attendees. The new system will allow the creator of an event to set each invite for a unit or member to optional or mandatory. This means that it will be possible to create an event that is optional for some while mandatory for others.
On the old website each event can either be a one-off event or an event that repeats every week on specific days of the week. These weekly events and one-off events are of course still supported on the new website. But we’ve also added some extra options for repeating events. The new website will support monthly events and events that happen every x number of weeks.
These new options will make it much easier to create repeating events that don’t happen every week such as the monthly TFO meeting or a biweekly staff meeting.
On the old website if you wanted to edit an event in a series of repeating events you would edit every event in that series. The new system will allow you to choose whether you want to edit a single event or the entire series.
Sometimes an event has to be cancelled, for that eventuality we have added a new event cancellation system. When an event is cancelled it will still show up in the event calendar but it will be clearly visible that the event is cancelled. It will be impossible to take attendance for cancelled events.
On the old website there are three main pages where attendance can be seen. These are: the attendance of an individual event, an overview of the attendance of all members in a unit, and the attendance of a specific member. All of these will make a return on the new website with additional options for filtering, searching, and sorting this data to make it easier to find the information that you are looking for.
TAW 3.0 will also come with an additional attendance report. This report will come in the form of a graph that displays the historic attendance of all events in a series. A mock-up of this graph is shown in the image below.
Please note that this image is just a mock-up and the final graph may look different.
Besides the major features outlined above we have also made some minor quality of life improvements.
On the old website it is impossible to revoke an invite to an individual member without deleting the event or discharging the member. This is of course slightly inconvenient so in TAW 3.0 you will be able to revoke invites with ease.
Taking attendance for optional events on the old website would lead to everyone who did not attend getting an excusal on their attendance report. This would in turn lower their mandatory average. In TAW 3.0 you will instead be marked as “not attended”. Being marked as not attended will not affect your mandatory average in any way.
On top of the features that will be coming in TAW 3.0 we have a couple of ideas to further improve the attendance & events system. These ideas will not be coming in the initial release but may be added in the future.
The TAW 3.0 Event system was designed from the start to be capable of being integrated with the vast majority of calendar applications such as Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook and Apple Calendar. Eventually this will give all members the option to easily add their TAW events to their own personal calendar. Once an event is added to your personal calendar it will remain in sync with TAW so any changes to the event on the TAW website would also carry over to your personal calendar.
The screenshot below contains a proof of concept where we synced a TAW event with the Google Calendar.
By compiling the attendance data in new ways we will be able to offer greater insights in the historical attendance of units and events.
When an event is cancelled the invited members could get a notification. Depending on the settings of the member they would get a notification for all events, mandatory events or no events.
This would allow you to schedule an event and invite all members with a certain position in a unit or its sub-units. This will make creating staff meetings a lot easier.