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.” [...]
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 an eRA. [...]
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.
Say [...]
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 [...]
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, templates, pages, [...]
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 [...]
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
Arena uses an [...]
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 [...]
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 that [...]
The Metric functionality in Arena is a very powerful tool for viewing changes in data over time (yes, I know, the UI could still use some improvements). Essentially it allows you to create any number of metrics by specifying a SQL statement that just returns one numeric value. Arena will then run that statement how [...]
