schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am happy to announce the release of SchoolTool 2.6 to the Ubuntu Saucy
Universe repositories, as well as the "dev" PPA for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and
13.04 (see http://book.schooltool.org/install-dev.html).

We received a lot of feedback via Launchpad regarding the last 2.5 beta
releases, which led to a stronger, if slightly later, final 2.6 release.
 Thanks to everyone who tested the beta!

Special thanks to the development team, Justas Sadzevicius and Douglas
Cerna, and release manager Gediminas Paulauskas, and of course Mark
Shuttleworth for his generous support.

SchoolTool 2.6 feature summary:

Task Queue
----------

To allow reports to be generated in the background, without blocking web
page response,  SchoolTool 2.6 is integrated with the Celery asynchronous
task queue (http://www.celeryproject.org/).

With the task queue architecture in place, future releases will expand its
use to allow imports and other long-running processes to take place in the
background without blocking or overloading the server.

Reports
-------

Printed reports have been updated to a clean, attractive design consistent
with SchoolTool's web interface.

Report request dialogs have also been updated for utility and consistency.
 Realtime feedback on report generation completion is provided in the
dialog.  For long-running reports, the dialog can be closed, and SchoolTool
used normally while the report is being created.

When reports are completed, a message is posted to the user's SchoolTool
home page.

Attendance Journal
------------------

Attendance tracking and participation grading have been made distinct modes
in the journal view.

Absences and tardies can be excused by teachers.

Clerks have new school-wide attendance management views to can excuse or
enter absences and run reports.

Schools can create and use custom attendance codes.

Participation grading can be based on any SchoolTool score system.

Homeroom attendance status is visible in all section journals for the day.

Administrative Roles
--------------------

Administrative roles have been differentiated to make it easier to prevent
accidental destructive changes to the system.  "School Administrators" can
view most data in the system but have limited editing rights.  "Clerks" can
enter and view data about students but cannot easily reconfigure the
server.

Search forms and read-only views of SchoolTool's gradebooks have been added
for administrators.

Auto-Complete Scoring
---------------------

When non-numeric grades are entered in a gradebook cell, an auto-complete
menu displays valid possible entries (e.g., the user enters "a" and "A",
"A+" and "A-" appear as auto-complete choices).

Name Order
----------

All tables and gradebooks should be sortable by first name or last name.

CanDo
-----

Improved support for deprecating groups of standards from previous years.

Notable Changes Since SchoolTool 2.5.3
--------------------------------------

Revised report card style.

Tracebacks can now be submitted to the correct project in Launchpad.

In new instances, "SchoolTool Administrator" user will be called "Default
Manager" to be more consistent with revised roles.

To make SchoolTool friendlier to locales that put the surname first, we
added a system-wide preference for sorting by first or last name by
default, removed places where the last name was listed first, and split
first and last name into separate sortable columns in all tables.  The
sorted name is always in the leftmost column in a table.

Fixed navigation bugs around multiple years in the School page.