I hope you’ve had a chance to update Panorama to the latest version and wanted to point out some of the new features that were released last month. We’re very excited about them and hope you are as well. Let’s take a look at what’s new:
Redesigned User Dashboard
We’ve quickly learned that many Panorama users want a single place that users can login and see any project that’s been assigned to them. This is perfect for clients and team members alike. Long term clients are likely to have several projects over the course of a year and having a central place to login keeps things simple for them. Likewise team members typically work on several projects at a time and a single login allows them to see and update their active projects.
This can be accessed by navigating to your Project Panorama “root” web address. By default this would be http://www.yourdomain.com/panorama/ – If you’ve changed “panorama” to something else like “projects” it would be http://www.yourdomain.com/projects/
Assigning Users Tasks
One of the most common requests is the ability to assign users tasks. You asked, we listened! We’ve built in this capability so you can assign any users on the project a task. Task assignments are now indicated on the project page itself and users who are assigned tasks will get a list on their user dashboard.
Phase Shortcodes
Sometimes the information you want to communicate to your client or team changes based on where you are during the project. Specifically, you may want to communicate one thing before a phase has started, another while it’s in progress and something else when completed.
For example you could:
- Indicate that a phase will begin when another has finished.
- Indicate that the phase has started and you’ll send out weekly updates.
- Indicate that the phase has ended and an invoice has been issued.
This is now possible using phase shortcodes. Simple use the following shortcodes in the phase description area and Panorama will automatically show and hide the content within them based on the phase progress.
[[before-phase]] Here is a message displayed before a phase starts [[/before-phase]]
[[during-phase]] Here is a message displayed during a phase [[/during-phase]]
[[after-phase]] Here is a message displayed after the phase has ended [[/after-phase]]
Misc. Enhancements
We’ve also done a host of miscellaneous enhancements including giving you more control over colors, improving the compatibility of the “custom template” mode (allowing you to use your theme templates to display project panorama pages) and sorting projects in the admin by active, complete, etc…
Make sure to update and take advantage of the exciting new features!