Hi everyone!

We’ve been hard at work continuing our mission to make My Music Staff the best music teacher site available! Today we have a big list of great changes to share with you. Here’s what’s new this week:

Multi-Teacher Studios

Multi-teacher studios can now create “Studio Events” that are not teacher specific. This allows multi-teacher studios to do several useful things:

1. Announce events (like an open house) that should appear on every teacher/student calendar.
2. Create studio events which may have limited space and students from multiple teachers attending.
3. You can now create blocked dates that apply to everyone, for example, Christmas Holidays. In the past, each teacher would need to block off the holiday break. Now you can create an All-Day event for the studio that blocks off the holiday.

 

Studio Email

There’s a few great updates to studio email:

1. You can now view your entire studio email history in once place.  Each student’s individual email history is still available on the Student Details page, but now you can view what was sent to everyone from a single location by clicking “Email > Email History” on the Student List page.
2. When viewing a previously sent email, you can now download the attachments by clicking the attachment filename.
3. Students/parents can now see their email history in the Student Portal. Now, if a student/parent deletes an old email they can just login to the student portal instead of asking you to resend it.

 

Studio Websites

We’ve added some new options for members who host their studio websites with us. For the power users out there, you can now turn on some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) settings which allows you to specify:

1. Google Analytics tracking code (or any other tracking code) in the footer of your website
2. Keyword and Description Meta Tags for each page in your website

To enable these feature, turn on “Advanced SEO Settings” from your Studio Settings page. These settings are completely optional, and you should only enable these if you’re actively trying to optimize your site.

 

Optimizations

We’ve been hard at work making a number of internal optimizations to My Music Staff. Depending on the size of your studio (and speed of your Internet connection) you might notice the following changes:

1. The “Families & Invoices” page should now load significantly faster for studios with many invoices
2. We’ve significantly reduced the overall page size, so members using low-speed or 3G connections should find the site more responsive, particularly when interacting with the pop-up windows
3. We’ve improved the way invoices are created, so generating many invoices in bulk should run more quickly

 

Miscellaneous

1. We’ve added a new Placeholder text to the Event Reminder email template which will remind students if they have due Library Items. (If you’re using the default email template, you get this automatically. If you’ve customized your Email Reminder template you will need to add this placeholder in yourself.)
2. There’s a new Practice Summary report which can be used to get a list of total hours practiced by each student in a specific date range. This is useful if you run a practice competition in your studio and need to see everyone’s practice time.
3. Items in the Download Library can now have their visibility set (items that are not visible cannot be seen or downloaded by students).
4. The “Apply Default Prices” option on the Student Page’s Tool menu now applies to all events, event those that have had the attendance taken.
5. We fixed a problem with the Homepage Agenda that could prevent the attendance from saving if you start taking attendance one day, and then complete it the next.
6. If you’re using an externally hosted site with My Music Staff, we changed the student portal “Logout” link so that the student is now taken back to your site.
7. At the bottom of the calendar page we’ve added some text to indicate when your calendar feed was last successfully retrieved (by either Google or your iOS device).
8. The “Help” popup should now use more space on larger screens (such as desktops and tables in landscape). This should make it easier to read.
9. We fixed a rare issue with the make-up credit could that would be a problem for single-teacher studios if you took attendance from the Student Details page, then immediately updated the student’s contact details and saved them.

We hope you enjoy these changes; there’s lots of more great stuff coming down the pipeline.

Have a great week!