Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

This week is full of planning meetings here at DoStuff HQ. Not only are we in the homestretch of Summit prep, we're also wrapping up Episode 7 and planning for Episode 8.

One of the most important parts of this planning period for the Product team is going through the DSD Queue to figure out what projects need more focus over the next few months.

Prepping DSD Queue For New Episode

Just as a quick refresh -- here at DoStuff we break our year into periods we call Episodes to assist in planning. An Episode ranges anywhere from 2-3 months depending on the time of year and what else is going on.

The week of planning between the old Episode and the new one is especially important because we need to decide where to dedicate our limited manpower in the coming months.

We'll have a full Episode 7 recap and Episode 8 preview coming soon, but in the meantime you might enjoy a peek into part of the planning process. Over the past few days, you may have noticed the Product team combing through all the tickets in the DSD Queue in Asana and segmenting them into buckets for E8 prep.



These segments have been used throughout this week by the product team to identify what's been generating a lot of DSD tickets lately and where they may need to focus their time over the next couple of months.

If you have any questions about what projects get picked for an Episode, it may be useful to go back to this exchange from the last Episode recap and to keep an eye out for the full Episode 8 preview in the coming weeks.

Our regular Metro News updates highlight big wins, cool ideas, and notable events from around the Network so you can stay up to date on what your counterparts around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are doing.

It's Friday afternoon and we know you're looking to get outside and enjoy this fall weather. But before you walk out the door for the weekend, take a look at what's going on around the Network this month.

doNYC’s CMJ Lens

As the CMJ Music Marathon heads towards its finale this weekend, we wanted to highlight one of the fest’s breakout acts -- doNYC.

For those that aren’t familiar, the CMJ Music Marathon is a week-long music fest in NYC consisting of 1,400 acts playing 80 clubs spread out across 2 boroughs. It’s the Big Apple’s answer to SXSW, only without Lady Gaga playing inside of a giant Doritos bag. Think SXSW of the early 2000’s, not 2014.

Really wanting to take advantage of this influx of indie music fans, doNYC spent months putting together a badass Conference Lens for CMJ.


The Conference Lens format gave doNYC a number of big advantages for engaging the CMJ crowd -- including customized site design, a default “slim cards” view to pack more shows onto a single page, and a “view by start time” check box for sorting through hundreds of daily shows.

It took a lot of planning a design work from the doNYC team, but people are noticing. Not least of whom, the CMJ team itself.


The engagement numbers have also been pretty impressive this week, with more than 25,000 page views and over 20,000 unique visitors to cmj.donyc.com. That’s the most trafficked Lens in DoStuff history after the Do512 SXSW Lens.

Check out this week’s product update for more info on building Lenses in Radmin, and keep doNYC’s baller CMJ Lens in mind the next time a conference-style festival is happening in your metro.

DoStuff Office Exchange

Some of you are already clued into this, but DoStuff is doing its first Network Office Exchange this month. Members of the Delivery team are spending a few days with a metro to get a better feel for needs on the "front lines", and to provide a bit more hands-on assistance as needed.

Google Hangouts and Slack are great and all, but it's not the same as working with y'all in person. And to be honest, we just miss your musk.


Here's the office exchange lineup for this October, and to those that feel left out don't worry. We're coming to hang with you soon.

• Oct. 20-24
• HazDF - Stuart
• Do214 - Ted
• Do206 - Kristin
• Oct. 27-31
• Do317 - Adi
• Do617 - Jordan
• DoLA - Justin

Other News

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

Big update this week! We have a brand new "Lenses" tab rolling out in Radmin, plus some other features and fixes added to the backend. Make sure you check out each one below!

(There WILL be a quiz.)

Lens and ECP Creation In Radmin

As we’re getting closer to moving the final bits of Admin over to Radmin, one of the features that’s been totally reimagined is Lenses. Lens creation, especially for ECPs, has long been a decentralized and pretty confusing process.

The new Lenses tab in Radmin, going live this week, will be the centralized place for you to manage existing lenses and oversee the creation of new ones.

But first, it’s probably best we do a little vocab review.

Vocab Review: Lenses and ECPs

We throw around a lot of acronyms and made-up lingo here at DoStuff and it can sometimes be hard to keep track. To make it even more fun, we sometimes switch up the meanings over time.


So before your head starts spinning, here are two terms we should define:

• Lens: A customized view of your metro’s Event listings, or a certain cross section of those listings. When viewing a Lens, the design elements stay consistent across Lists and Event pages. Lenses can live on-site or on a third-party site and come in three different flavors:
• ECP (third-party)
• e.g. KCRW
• Metro (on-site)
• e.g. Do312 Rainbow
• Conference (on-site)
• e.g. doCMJ
• ECP: An Event Calendar Partner (ECP) is a type of Lens that "lives" on a third-party partner’s site, and lists a personalized calendar of Events for their audience.

Creating an ECP in Radmin

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at the new Lens Creation process that will be coming to Radmin in the next few days. The set up is pretty much the same for all Lenses, but we’re going to use ECPs as an example.

With Radmin you can automate a large portion of ECP set up -- from emailing designers to creating the URL to building a service agreement. In fact, our goal is to give you the ability to build an entire ECP from start to finish without DoStuff’s help whatsoever.

To create a new ECP in Radmin, you'll click “New Lens” in the top-right of the ECPs page and be taken to this form:


Here's what you'll enter into each field:

1. Title: What's the ECP going to be called?
2. Mode: What type of Lens are you building? (Hint: You’re building an ECP.)
3. User: Enter the email of the user that will be voting on Events for the ECP. (Note: They must be a registered user on your site before you can create the ECP.)
4. Original URL: Paste the URL for your ECP partner's website so your designer can match the design and layout. (Note: This field only appears for ECPs.)
5. Designers: Enter the email of the designer(s) that will be building the ECP. As soon as the ECP is created, they will be notified along with a link to their Radmin Dashboard so they can get started. (Note: This field only appears for ECPs.)
6. Domain: What will the Lens' domain URL be? This will create a new URL on our server. (Note: You must create a URL ending in your metro's domain name to get started -- e.g. ecpname.doxxx.com. Later on you can redirect to a partner's domain URL if that was part of the agreement.)
7. Locked Username: Is the Locked box checked? This is the username that will be used to access the ECP before it's unlocked (be sure to give to you designer and parters).
8. Locked Password: Is the Locked box checked? This is the password that will be used to access the ECP before it's unlocked.

Before you press 'Save', click on the Service Agreement tab to enter the contact details for your ECP partner. The Service Agreement is a standard contract generated for all ECPs and basically says that DoStuff gives the partner permission to host our Event listings on their site. Enter the required info on this tab and press "Save".

A number of things will happen when you finish all these steps. First and foremost, the ECP will be created and will be visible in your Lenses tab in Radmin.

In addition, 1.) the ECP domain URL will be added to our server automatically, 2.) your designer will receive an email with the relevant details and instructions for building the ECP, and 3.) a Service Agreement will be generated using the contact details you entered earlier.

From this point, you can work 1-on-1 with your designer and ECP contact to finalize the site design, get the Service Agreement "signed", and decide on a launch date. Before you can launch the ECP, it's your responsibility to make sure your partner reads the Service Agreement and clicks "Agree" while logged into their account. To find the link to the Service Agreement at any time, click "View Agreement" on the ECP's details page in Radmin, or through the cog menu on the main ECP page.

While all this is may seem like a lot to learn right now, you'll find that you'll soon be creating and launching ECPs completely independent of DoStuff and the support team using this new process.

Service Agreements

With this new ECP creation process in Radmin, a signed Service Agreement will now be required for every single active ECP.

We’re well aware that the large majority of existing ECPs do not have a signed Service Agreement in place at this time -- the blame for this rests mostly on our shoulders anyway. But in order to make sure that DoStuff and the metros are protected going forward, we need all ECPs to agree to the standard Service Agreement.

We’ll work with each of you in the coming weeks to help you along the process of getting these generated and "signed" using Radmin.

Timezone Fix for RSVPs

As some of you have noticed in the past, the field for automatically emailing guestlists in Radmin hasn’t always worked too well.

The root cause was that Radmin standardized all events to the same time zone in the backend, but wasn’t taking this into account in the RSVP modal. Depending on what time zone you’re in, “1 hour prior” could turn into “3 hours prior”.

To fix this, we had to add an entirely new field at the bottom of the modal that now runs on a dropdown. This is the “good” guest list field. It can tell time and do basic addition and subtraction, as opposed to the “bad” field.


But here’s the catch, before we can kill the “bad’ field we need you to manually switch all your current RSVPs to the “good” one. You can do this by entering the proper time in the “good” field and leaving the “bad” field blank.

Since both of these are currently working, it’s really important you do this for all RSVPs (Approved Events > Filters > RSVP) and let us know when you’re done. Once we know that everyone has successfully switched over we’ll kill the “bad” field and you’ll never hear from it again.

Default Share Image

We’ve added a new field in Radmin under Site Design > Images for setting the default share image on Facebook and other social sites. Up until now, the thumbnail that pops up when you share a link has been your metro’s logo, which doesn’t always look too hot when it shows up against Facebook’s white background (see below).


Now you can upload a custom photo or graphic to Radmin to improve the way your links appear in Facebook's News Feed and help drive more clicks.

Media Search Functions

There’s been some confusion about what all the buttons in Radmin’s new media search widget do, so we thought we’d clear it up so you’re not left worrying about pressing the wrong thing:

1. Page Icon: Updates the Facebook Page info (Does NOT change the current image)
2. Check Icon: Update the current image AND updates the Facebook Page info
3. Arrow Icon: Scrolls to next image

The difference between the page icon and the check icon are important to note the next time you need to update a Venue or Artist’s Facebook ID but don’t want to change the background image that’s currently being used.

Hidden User Activity Is Hidden

This may sound redundant, but the activity of hidden users is now hidden across the entire site. In the past, hidden users have appeared in the Event Activity feed under the name “Anonymous Coward”.

We decided it was kind of mean to call everyone a coward so now their activity just doesn’t show up anymore.

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That's all for this week! We'll let you know in Slack when the Lenses tab is about to go live in Radmin so you know to keep an eye out for it.

Greetings!

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

There are no big product updates this week so we're just giving you a quick rundown of all the recent bug fixes.

Bug Fixes

• Auto-voting Venues: Users that are set to autovote were not always voting on Events at Venues that they follow. This was especially troublesome for neighborhood pages and other site-specific users. This has been fixed.
• Co-reg for Future DoSites: This will only affect future DoStuff sites, but new users are now co-registered to the nearest metro -- even if it's not live yet. Unfortunately for Do502, no one from Louisville that created a Forecastle schedule this summer was added as a Do502 user because their site was still inactive. This was a big pain point and has been remedied by DoStuff for future launches.
• Event Photos on ECPs: If an Event was created on the front-end of your site, the photos were not always displaying properly on ECP sites, and vice versa. This has been corrected so that photos are consistent on both ECPs and metro sites.
• Past Events Popping Up Unexpectedly: There was a recent issue with past repeating Events showing up at the top of certain venue pages. This has been fixed.

That's all for this week! Stay tuned to Slack for the latest news from around the Network and be sure to log all bugs and suggestions in the DSD Queue.

Evenin' everybody,

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes coming to your site or to Radmin.

A few bug fixes and improvements for you guys this week. Hope you like 'em!

Event Search

The Dev team is working hard to improve the power and functionality of Event Search in Radmin. Hopefully you’ve been able to notice the difference as of late.

Filtering By Event Type

This week we added the ability to filter past and current Events by type -- single day, ongoing, and repeating. In your Approved Events queue, expand the Filters menu and you’ll see the new “Event Type” options at the bottom.



Filtering by Event type will help you quickly spot how many weekly repeating Events you have on the site, or track down ongoing Events that might need to be broken up into multiple Events so they show up on your daily listings.

Improved Past Event Search

We’re still working to make it perfect, but searching for past Events has been much improved over the past couple weeks. Drop a line to support if you’re still seeing new issues, or just to let us know that it’s working now!

Copying Events With Images

Copying an Event now copies over all attached images to the new Event. Copying (Click on the gear icon > “Copy”) has always carried over all Event details and Artists, but now any attached cover images and poster images will be carried over as well.

Time saving FTW!

Finding Recently Ended Event Ads

When viewing inactive Event Ads (Advertising > Filters > “Include Inactive”), they are now sorted automatically by most recently completed. Before the default view was alphabetically by Campaign title, which wasn’t too useful for finding an Event Ad that ended last week.



For a number of complicated reasons, it’s not possible right now to sort the date columns for Event Ads any other way (all the columns are fully sortable with Brand Ads), but default sorting by most recent end date should help you find recently ended campaigns for your ad reports.

Radmin Dashboard Is Live!

For those following along in Slack earlier today, you saw the announcement that the Radmin Dashboard is now live. Read more about the features in last week's Product Update and share any thoughts you have with the rest of the Network over on Slack.

Welcome to October!

Hi everyone,

Happy Hobbit Day! (or American Business Women's Day, if that's more your flavor),

Welcome to the new week, and with it, the updated weekly KPI report. To start off with, check out the exploits of our Winners of the Week: 

Greetings!

It's KPI time, and with that, a couple of logistical matters: