Jeff Bowman
After lots of hard work all last fall and early this winter, we're pleased to announce two new major features have been added to our website: an online lodge reservation system and online merchandise sales. We've also made some smaller, noteworthy improvements.
Lodge Reservation System
Did you know that The Mountaineers has three lodges in western Washington? If so you probably knew that we had been using Brown Paper Tickets to handle lodge reservations. We are delighted to announce that this winter season we are taking lodge reservations right here at mountaineers.org.
We created a streamlined reservation process so it's easy to choose multiple dates from a calendar, add guests who you're bringing, and pay for all your reservations in one transaction. Moving reservations to our own website also ensures faster refunds for lodge stay cancellations and allows you to view and manage your lodge stays on your profile page.
Ready to play in the snow? Reserve a stay at one of our lodges: Baker Lodge, Meany Lodge and Stevens Lodge!
merchandise sales
From time to time, we've offered merchandise with The Mountaineers logo in the bookstore at the Seattle Program Center. Now we have the capability to sell that merchandise online in addition to the books we publish. Check out what we have and buy something today! You can show your support of The Mountaineers around town, in the mountains and on the water!
We also have merchandise stocked at the bookstore in Seattle!
New registration notes field on Activities
We now have registration notes available to participants! Leaders, if you have a question that you want to ask your participants, you can add it so that it will appear in the registration dialog. This can be applied to activities—trips, clinics, seminars, lectures, and field trips.
Leaders, you'll see this when editing an activity:
Participants, you'll see this when registering for the activity:
Leaders privacy update
In our last round, 2.7 - Mobile Website, Youth Forms, we improved how to understand who can see your information with the Our Privacy Policy Explained, and streamlined the information on your profile page.
If you are a leader your participants must be able to view your profile to communicate with you. We always allowed members and guests who were logged in to view your profile even if your profile was set to "private." In this update, we have corrected this oversight and made this part of our privacy policy clearer. All leader profiles are now automatically set to viewable.
Remember that as a leader you already can see the profile, activity history, and course history for all members and guests. This privilege allows you to review participant qualifications when leading an activity that is more challenging.
Improved Calendar System
We moved to a more flexible event/calendar system based on tags. Previously we only were using tags to ensure that an event was showing up on our Home Page or as a public vs. internal committee program.
Now all events should have one or more of our "branch" tags (e.g. Everett Branch, Stevens Lodge) for them to show on their calendar. The benefit using tags on events is that we can tag an event so that it appears on multiple calendars without needing to add a separate event for each calendar. A great example of this is the Leadership Conference we had in December—it's one event, but one we want it on every branch calendar.
When adding an event, list tags in the "Categorization" tab. It's very important to use existing tags and to note that tags are case sensitive (e.g. use Kitsap Branch, NOT kitsap branch). To learn more about adding events, visit our Schedule an Event how-to.
Additionally ALL activity leaders are now able to list and publish events on branch calendars that aren't happening at our Program Centers. Previously only the branch committee admins could add events. Now anyone on the leader list can list something for our branches. Room reservations will continue to go through submit for publication so that Andriana Fletcher (Seattle Events Manager) and Sarah Hold (Tacoma Program Manger) can confirm that there aren't room conflicts at the Seattle and Tacoma Program Centers.
RESOURCES TAB ADDED TO ROUTEs & PLACES
Got an awesome map or GPS track you want to add to one of our Routes & Places? We now have the ability to add a folder that appears on a route/place as the "Resources" tab. Peter Hendrickson and I are leading a group of volunteers to add the resources we already have and develop a process to add ones submitted by our members and guests.
If you are interested in helping, please email us via info@mountaineers.org or if you have resources to share for a particular route/place email the information and the name of the route/place. Our team will ensure was have a consistent naming convention, that the resources are appropriate, and post them.
Read the Coming Soon: Enhanced Trip Navigation Resources blog post for more information and the latest updates on this project.
