A new interactive page has been released for monitoring student absences.  You can see the new page here or by going to Manage > Classes > Student Absences.  This page uses information from Online Attendance to highlight any students with recent absences.  The filters allow you to look for students with multiple and/or consecutive absences.  Attendance data for make-ups, demos and drop-ins is also included. 
You can select students in the list and send them the "Student Absence" notification.  This notification has no default content.  You'll need to enter content for this notification at Communications > Settings > Notification Templates before sending it. 

Note: you may wish to use these tokens when creating your email:  
%student_first_name% 
%student_last_name% 
%contact_first_name%
%contact_last_name%

A new optional "day of week" summary section has been added to the Enrollment Summary Report. This will show a summary of enrollments for each day of the week.  The report has also been updated to include all class types active in the selected semester, even if they do not currently have any enrollments.

The ability to select teacher and location "short names" has been added to the Named Layouts page.  These columns can now be selected for class schedule layouts.

A new "Checkout Now" button has been added to online registration and drop-in registration pages.  When clicked, this button will attempt take the user directly to the final checkout page.  

This button will take the user to the shopping cart page if the user needs to make an optional price selection or if any coupons are currently active for the selected classes.  The "Featured Items" store page will still display if it is active as well.

You can now define online registration requirements that reference user-defined field values for your students.  This can be used to require students to have attained a particular level before registering.

For example, assume have a student-level user-defined field called Skill Level with the values Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced.  You could require that advanced classes be offered to intermediate students only.  On the "Additional Info" page for those classes, you would require that all registering students have the skill level Intermediate for this class.  Any students that do not have the correct skill level will not be allowed to register.  Note: you can allow a list of possible values for registering students, like Intermediate and Advanced.

Click here to add student-level custom fields

Click here to update your classes

For Back Office customers who do not use a Main Street Sites website, we have just released the ability to embed class schedules into your native web pages. 

If you go to Website > Vaults > Component Vault and add a new class component you'll see that we've added both a new "Filters" and an "Embed" tab.  The "Filters" tab lets you decide which classes you want to include in the component (including a new semester filter).

The "Embed" tab has formatting options at the top, then a preview pane to show you what the embedded schedule will look like on your site.  The different formatting settings let you update the look of the class schedule to match your site design.  At the bottom of the page is the actual code for the component that you'll copy and add to your website.

Each component you create in this way will use a layout from Named Layouts.  A layout can contain any columns you'd like to use in any order.  Layouts can be created and edited by going to Website > Settings > Named Layouts.  

Please reach out to customer support if you'd like help adding schedules to your web pages using this feature.

Note: customers using Main Street Sites websites have always had the ability to add class schedules to any page.  This is done by creating a new component and inserting it onto a page using the "Component" toolbar button.

Main Street Sites users with user-defined fields can now clear the existing values of those fields when needed.  This can be useful when you have values that are expected change over time like clothing sizes, school bus number, etc.

To clear the stored values of an existing user-defined field, go to Setup > Advanced > Field Manager and hover over the relevant user-defined field.  Use the drop-down menu to select the "Clear Values" option for that field.

Please note that once performed this operation can't be undone.

Users of online attendance can now enter notes for each class meeting.  This can be used by teachers to enter notes from class for the center director to review.

Class meeting notes can also be viewed and entered from Manage > Classes > Class Meetings.

The new Re-enrollment Summary Report now supports the ability to select which class statuses you'd like to include in the report.

More options have been added for how you can limit user access to demos.  You can now set a maximum number of demos per semester, per calendar year, for the last 365 days or for all time.  This setting can be changed by going to Setup > Make-ups, Demos & Drop-ins > Demo Settings.

New options for sending SMS text messages have been added. 

There is now an option to send messages by both email and SMS text.  This option is for critical messages that you want customers to see as soon as possible.  

We also added the option to send messages via SMS text only.  This removes all restrictions on the content of the messages.  As long as you are sending via SMS text only it is OK to include marketing messages and promotions in your messages.  The restrictions on content exist only for emails. This is necessary because Send Message sends emails that bypass the "unsubscribe" option.

Note: SMS text messages are currently only available to customers in the US and Canada.

A new re-enrollment summary report has been added.  This report looks at class enrollments across semesters to calculate re-enrollment rates.  In addition to calculating a total re-enrollment number, you can also see re-enrollment by teacher, location and class type.