We’ve got some great news! Project Panorama 1.2.2 has been released and we’ve done a ton of work. Like always, we strongly recommend backing up your entire site before doing an update. Some of the new features require a database upgrade script making it EXTRA important. Now, let’s dive into what we’ve done!
New Features
We’ve added a handful of new features, listed below in order of excitement.
E-Mail Notifications
We’ve added e-mail notifications! Now if you have a project that is restricted to specific users, you can choose to notify them upon your next project update. We spent a lot of time thinking through this feature and to ensure you don’t blast people with e-mail with every tiny update, we’ve decided to require checking the “Notify Users” checkbox when you’d like the notifications to go out. We’ve also created default e-mail notification settings so you can save time by setting a default message for all your projects.
Read through the e-mail notification documentation to learn more or troubleshoot any issues.
Specify Hours per Phase
To provide better control over your phase length and more accurate tracking, you can now specify how many hours (or days) a given phase will take. This way the auto calculation algorithm will provide an accurate measurement of how far through a project you are. If you liked the weighted phases you can still use that functionality as well.
Expand and Collapse Phases in the Admin
Thanks to Mark Root-Wiley we’ve added the ability to expand and collapse phases in your admin editor. This will make it much easier to manage projects with lots of phases or phases with lots of tasks.
Misc Updates
We’ve also done a handful of misc. updates and bug fixes including:
- Panorama settings are now in three separate tabs for better organization
- Cleaned up the project editor interface
- Added the ability to choose if tasks should be expanded or collapsed
- You now have global phase settings rather than settings per each phase
- Added a graph to the dashboard widget
- Added the ability to specify the number of projects to list using the “project_list” shortcode using the count=”10″ attribute.
Download through your WordPress admin interface or by logging into ProjectPanorama.com. We’ve got another half-dozen features staged for testing and our next release so stay tuned for more news.