10 changes shipped across 1 codebase last week, all of it client work. No product updates this week... the whole week went into one round of updates to the CMS behind the Columbus REALTORS® website. It reached the live site on 18 March.
A fair chunk of those 10 were the plumbing that gets a release like this out safely. The parts the association team will actually notice are below.
Client work: Columbus REALTORS®
Website analytics inside the CMS. Connect the site's Google Analytics once, and the association team can see traffic sources, devices, locations, engagement, top pages and how individual listings are doing, without leaving the CMS. Pick a date range, and export to CSV when the board wants numbers.
E-Notes. A new content type for short member notices, each with a publication date and an expiry date. Drop an E-Notes list on any page, as a list or a grid, filtered by category if you like.
Alert banners are in the CMS. The scheduled banners we built a couple of weeks ago went out with this release. Write the message, set a start and end time, pick the homepage or events page, done.
Embed a widget without waiting on us. A new HTML embed block lets the team paste in a third-party snippet, like a commercial property search, and place it on a page themselves.
Committees that stay in sync. Committees and their members now stay in sync with official membership data.
A tidier admin. The CMS navigation is now grouped into collapsible sections, and the site has a fresh set of icons for browser tabs and phone home screens.
If you need something like this built for your industry, this is what we do.
One thing I learned
The best CMS feature is one that means the client doesn't need us.
The HTML embed block isn't clever. But without it, every time the association wanted a new widget on a page, that was an email to us, a ticket, a deploy. With it, they paste the snippet and they're done.
That's the test I'm using more and more for client work. Not "what can we build for them?" but "what are they waiting on us for... and can they do it themselves?".
See you next week.
— Daz
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