Restarters.net software updates (changelog)

[james]

As always, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes making tweaks and improvements to Restarters. Here are the key things we’ve been up to over the last few months…

May to July 2023

Introducing smarter item entry

Tired of finding the right category for the items you enter? No longer! Instead of scrolling through a long list of categories to find the right one, the system will now automatically select a category for you when you enter an item. This should speed up data entry and help avoid miscategorising items, making your impact stats more accurate. More details here:

Making repair data easier to record (part 2) - what's changing?

Hi everyone! As part of our ongoing effort to make entering items seen at events faster and easier, we’re changing the way items are recorded on Restarters. What’s changing? At the moment, when you add a new item to an event, you first choose a category that matches the item from a long dop-down menu. Depending on the category you choose, you may then see a new box appear asking you what the item is - we call this the ‘item type’ field. For example, here’s how to enter a blender : Select ‘Small kitchen item’ from the drop down menu Type ‘blender’ into the item type field that ap…

New features for networks

We’re thrilled to welcome another new network to Restarters: Cambridgeshire Repair Café Network

• We created a network for Cambridgeshire Repair Café Network and have begun to welcome members to Restarters. Welcome all!
• We added some network-specific fields for groups, giving network coordinators more granular information about their groups
• For network coordinators from Cambridgeshire and RCANZ, we added links to your analytics dashboards to your network pages for easy reference

Localisation

• We’ve renamed ‘New Zealand’ to ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’ in the English version of Restarters to recognise that the islands were Māori first
• Country names are now translatable so that they can appear in the appropriate language when using Restarters in another language

Minor improvements

• We removed the “number of volunteers does not match the attendance record” error message, as it was causing confusion (thanks for flagging this @Sandy_Skelton)
• Recording the brand and model of items is optional, but this wasn’t obvious. So we added ‘(if known)’ to the placeholder text in these fields when adding repair data
• We removed the ‘useful URL’ field to reduce clutter when entering repair data as no one was using it anyway

Back end upgrades

• We’ve improved our disaster recovery process for the repair Wiki
• We introduced more automated testing to catch bugs before they’re released
• We upgraded the underlying code for creating & editing events to make this quicker
• The API saw some minor updates - we’ve already been in touch with those of you who will be affected

Bug fixes

• We fixed broken search filters in the ‘all groups’ section (thanks for reporting this @Brigitte_Sistig)
• Entering a manual weight for items is always optional when that item has a category, despite the help text sometimes suggesting otherwise. We corrected this help text to clarify when a manually entered weight is required for an environmental impact calculation.
• We fixed the ‘updated at’ value for events returned via the API
• Network coordinators can once again create events for groups they host that aren’t in their network (thanks for reporting this @Julie_Evans)
• Fixed a bug sometimes prevented emails from being sent (thanks for flagging this @Shelini_Kotecha)

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