Most of what our developers do is invisible. Every so often, though, something small lands that you notice the first time you use it, because it’s the thing you’ve been quietly working around for years. Nick, our Head of Software, and the rest of the team have spent a long stretch on exactly that sort of work, and there is a lot of it, so we’ll be writing about it over the coming days and weeks. Here are the first three.
Here’s a short walkthrough of all three.
The group tree in Site Manager holds the shape of your site. Until now, changing anything in it meant selecting a group, opening its settings and hunting for the right option. Renaming a group meant going into Group Settings, editing the ‘Name’ field under Properties, and saving.
Now you can right-click any group in the tree and do it from there. ‘New subgroup’, ‘Rename’, ‘Move’ and ‘Delete’. Four of the jobs people do most often, right where they’re already looking.
The sidebar can be resized too. Drag the handle anywhere between 195 and 520 pixels wide, and your browser remembers it, or double-click the handle to reset it. That sounds like nothing until you’re working on a site with deep sections and long group names, and half of them are cut off.
Two more things while we were in there. Creating a sub-group now has an ‘Add as the first sub-group’ toggle, which saves you reordering the list every time this year’s sermon series needs to go at the top. And if you’re logged in as an admin, the public menus now refresh straight away when you publish or unpublish a homepage article, reorder groups or move one, rather than waiting for the cache to catch up.
The Documents, Media and Rotas tabs now behave the way you’d expect from Google Drive. Hover over a row or a tile and a checkbox appears. Tick what you want, or shift-click to select a whole range at once. A dark bar shows how many you have selected, with ‘Select all’ and a way to clear it again.
From there, you can publish, unpublish, move, send to the recycle bin, restore or delete. Hubb only offers the actions that apply to every item in your selection, so nothing gets half done, and it tells you exactly how many items you’re about to affect before you confirm. Where there’s something worth knowing first, it says so: recording files, images that are in use elsewhere, rotas with people already signed up.
Two sensible guardrails. Changing a filter or running a search clears the selection, so you can never act on something that has scrolled out of sight. And there’s a limit of 500 items per action.
Picture a media group holding 60 photos from last summer’s holiday club, all filed in the wrong place. That used to be 60 separate moves. Now it’s one.
There’s a small new icon at the right-hand end of the search bar at the top of the web office, so it’s with you wherever you are in Hubb.
Click it, and you’ll see the records you visited most recently, each with a coloured icon showing what it is. Across the top, filters let you view only groups, people, orgs, families or queries.
Click the star beside anything in that list, and it moves up into Favourites at the top, where it stays. So if you open the same query every Monday morning, or go back to the same group every time you put the notice sheets together, star it once. After that, it’s a click away from any page in the web office.
The recent list looks after itself and tidies up overnight, so it won’t slowly fill with things you opened once in March.
If you don’t use that search bar much, it’s worth seeing what it could already do. Have a look at Quick Find and Filter.
I should be honest about my part in all this: there isn’t one. Nick and the software team built every bit of it. My contribution was a little testing and this blog post.
Nick, Head of Software
Nick leads the software team at Hubb. These three changes are his, along with a good many more still to come. They’re the sort of improvements that never make it onto a brochure, but churches have been asking us for them for a while, and between them they’ll quietly give somebody back an afternoon. Thank you, Nick!
There’s plenty more where this came from, and we’ll write about it soon.
Adam