Catholic Personnel Management

• In Catholic instances, we're adding a new feature for Personnel. This way, diocesan staff can manage clergy, religious, staff, and other types of personnel records! You can track personnel details, assignments and roles, benefits, and other important information.
• For more details and step-by-step instructions, check out our new help section.

Charts

• Fixed an issue where the lines were not displaying on line charts when you applied more than one view.

Contacts

• On Contact records, you can now track Primary Language. Additionally, in Catholic instances, you can track Faith Background. The options for these new fields are located under Lookup Values, so you can add, edit, and remove values as needed.
  Note: If you're already tracking language or religion information in a custom field on Contact records, you can hide the new field(s) using Field Management to avoid confusion.

Front Porch Wifi

• Due to Apple's ongoing privacy and security updates as well as customer feedback, we are no longer offering the Front Porch integration. If you have an established integration, you can continue using it. The limited information shared from devices over Wi-Fi networks makes it harder to track individual devices over time, which is a key component of presence-based attendance tracking.

Group Resubscribes

• MinistryPlatform can now receive resubscribe requests from SendGrid! If you're using SendGrid's group unsubscription feature with Platform publications, you'll need to update your webhook settings in SendGrid to send this information. (Here's how to do that.) That way, the contact's publication subscription will automatically update when they resubscribe.

Messages

• If you've ever sent an outbound text message from the wrong number, you're in luck! The New Message Tool now displays which outbound SMS number you're using when you select Text Message as the message type. You can still change the outbound SMS number on the Advanced tab.

  

• We added a Groups tab on Outbound SMS Number records so you can easily see groups that are using each number for texting.

  

• If you use a very large image in an email and send it to a bunch of people, it can negatively impact your Platform performance. To help you manage these, we added views that show you which messages or templates are considered large. On the Messages page, check out the Large Messages view, and on the Templates page, check out the Large Templates view. We're working on additional enhancements to further help you combat these when you're creating messages and templates.
• We changed the way MinistryPlatform processes messages to be more efficient! Now, MFA requests are prioritized so recipients get them in a timely manner. This is especially helpful when those messages are requested after you send larger messages (like publications) to thousands of recipients.

Report Viewer

• Next time you select a report, you'll notice that the look and feel of the report viewer is more similar to what you see in the Platform. When you view the report, you'll still see the same report layout that you're used to.

  

Sacraments

• Fixed an issue in Catholic instances where "Mother's Name on Certificate" sometimes displayed twice on the Marriage record in the Platform.

Schema

• We added schema to support a future feature called Memorized Batches in the Batch Manager Tool.
• We added schema to support a future feature for pledge batching in the Batch Manager Tool.
• We added schema to support a future feature for Automatic Reminders in Volunteer Connect.
• We added Payment Type values for Stock and Crypto to support a future integration.
• We added a read-only field for Date Submitted to the Communication Messages table.
• We added a configuration setting for TOOLS, AssignLowestEnvelopeNumberByCongregation that will be used in the future.

Search

• Do you ever need to search for a special character without it acting like a wildcard? Maybe you want to find records that include a percent sign (%), left bracket ([), right bracket (]), caret (^), or underscore (_). Now, you can use a backslash (\) —also known as the escape character in SQL— to explicitly search for that special character in the page search bar or column search. For example, to find records that start with the caret (^), you would enter \^%. To find records that start with multiple characters like %*^, you would enter \%\*\^%. In these examples, the percent sign (%) at the end of the search is used as the wildcard, whereas all the other characters are being searched for in that specific sequence.

Users and Permissions

• Fixed an issue where underscores (_) were being removed from the User Name after other profile fields were updated in the My Profile widget.
• Fixed an issue where the Pick List view was not honored on a tab if the user didn't have permissions to the main page.

Writing Assistant

• Have you tried out the Writing Assistant? Now, it's available for Mission Trip Description, Milestone Description, and Care Case Description to help you craft these short descriptions more quickly!

Coming Soon: Audit Log Retention Policies

SPoCs will receive an email about our plans for Audit Log retention. The idea is that, for high performance areas of MinistryPlatform, the Audit Log will keep changes for a certain number of days. For other areas that don't impact system performance, the Audit Log will keep multiple years. This will improve performance on your system. Remember, these policies would not delete any of your data, just the fact that the data was changed. This release includes schema to support that, and we'll be reaching out with more details about what this looks like.

Coming Soon: Member and Family Wording

In a January email update, we let you know about a change we're making for new customers. In Catholic instances, the term "Member" will be replaced by "Participant" and the term "Family" will be replaced by "Household" to better align with the associated tasks. Learn more about our Platform Terminology Changes.