Arena

David Turner on October 12th, 2010

I mentioned improving performance in Arena Assignment Types during my RefreshCache presentation.  It was actually just a stored procedure change.  Here’s the change if you’d like to see if it helps your performance…   ALTER PROC [dbo].[asgn_sp_get_assignmentTypeList]   (   @ParentAssignmentTypeID int   , @PersonID int   )   AS     DECLARE @hierarchy TABLE [...]

Continue reading about Assignment Types Performance

David Turner on March 11th, 2010

As Arena Administrators, we like to know of problems before our users do.  To that end we created an “Alerts” module.  We’ve placed this module on our Arena home page and secured it so that only Arena Administrators can see it.  It tests for various conditions and when problems occur, it will display an “alert.”  [...]

Continue reading about Alerts

eRA

David Turner on October 8th, 2009

During RefreshCache, Jon showed a lot of the stuff we’ve been doing with eRA (estimated regular attendees).  Here is how we capture that data… dtmt_estimated_regular_attendees This is the table that stores all the data.  To track the eRA wins and losses, we need to know at any point in time, whether a family is considered [...]

Continue reading about eRA

David Turner on September 1st, 2009

As you begin to use metrics more, you may come across the need to summarize some of the data that gets collected in metrics.  Fortunately, there is a little hidden attribute on each metric called Aggregate Type.  While aggregate type isn’t really used by the Arena UI, it can be useful in various reporting scenarios. [...]

Continue reading about Aggregate Type

David Turner on August 31st, 2009

I often get requests from fellow staff members asking for a report about their “Regular” attendees.  After I explain to them that SQL doesn’t have a “Regular” key word, and that I need to know exactly what they mean by “regular” they usually  go away to think about it and never end up coming back [...]

Continue reading about “Regular” Attendees

David Turner on June 15th, 2009

Earlier today, I received an email asking what functionality Arena provides when used to drive a church’s public website.  I thought I’d share my response… Content Management System (CMS) Arena is a CMS.  It may not be the fanciest and easiest to use CMS out there, but it provides all the functionality for configuring portals, [...]

Continue reading about Arena as a CMS

David Turner on May 28th, 2009

For a long time, we’ve been putting our staff anniversaries on our Arena home page each month… I’m ashamed to say that until now, our department admin has been doing this manually each month.  I also noticed that she recently started changing the highlighting each day to indicate which anniversaries in the month had already [...]

Continue reading about Staff Anniversaries

David Turner on February 24th, 2009

In the interest of possibly helping anyone else set up their podcast, here’s how Arena podcasting is configured in our environment (You can click on any of these images to see them full size). Feed Formats Before setting up any channels, you’ll need to setup your available feed formats in the Arena Administration area. XSLT [...]

Continue reading about Podcast Setup

David Turner on June 16th, 2008

You may have noticed that when creating an occurrence in Arena, you can associate it with an area…. This is useful if you are providing Area specific pages on your web site and you’d like people to see any events that are occurring for that area, or you’d like your area leaders be able to [...]

Continue reading about Area Specific Events

David Turner on June 13th, 2008

A cool feature on the Area Details page of Arena is the ability to customize the "Tools" tab to include any HTML that you’d like.  When editing the settings of the Area Detail module, any HTML that you include in the Details section will be displayed in the Tools tab. For example, this the HTML [...]

Continue reading about Area “Tools” Tab