Tech Forum

Appreciate the effort to give us a newsletter for wards and stakes. It needs quite a few other features to be functional, however. Here are some that popped immediately after trying it out.

1. Approval flow: Need to be able to create a draft article and have it edited and/or approved by the bishop, stake president, auxiliary president, etc., before it goes live.
2. Formatting: A plain text newsletter is way too boring and impedes communication. We need at least the same kind of functionality as in this Forum (why not use the same editing code?). Multiple fonts, sizes, and colors; images; videos; indents; tables; and left/center/right align are just some that come to mind.
3. Need a table of contents or some way to organize the articles. Categories is helpful but a newsletter needs a good ToC to organize multiple articles into an issue format or similar.

One other that came out in our testing this week. We would like to use the newsletter to do targeted training to certain groups in the stake. To facilitate that, we need to have certain articles wtih limited availability--just for bishops or bishoprics, just for high councilors, just for stake and ward Primary leaders, etc. Since lds.org knows everyone's calling when they login, it would really be useful to take advantage of that and let us target specific articles to such groups. This is especially relevant as we are dealing with the decreased number of training opportunities per the new handbook. We see this as a great way to fill some of that training gap, but only if we can restrict viewing. Thus Categories, while handy for organizing articles, do not meet the need as everyone can see them. Thanks for your consideration.

Adding an Expiration Date... it would be nice to have an expiration date for a newsletter article, or an way to automatically trigger an archive... something "blog" like. That way, old newsletters items don't stay around when they're no longer relevant but nothing new has been added, yet.

hirsp1 wrote:Adding an Expiration Date... it would be nice to have an expiration date for a newsletter article, or an way to automatically trigger an archive... something "blog" like. That way, old newsletters items don't stay around when they're no longer relevant but nothing new has been added, yet.

The newsletter help states

To avoid potential claims under various data privacy laws, newsletters may not be retained longer than a year. If the newsletter will be incorporated into a ward/stake history, a more formal approval process must be followed.

This implies that after a year if the article has not been updated to reset the date the article will be removed by the system. So I doubt there will ever be a blog type archive of articles. Instead the procedures found in completing annual histories should be followed.

Perhaps one other option would be to allow use of HTML code. this would allow us to fix whatever format is not available as well and expand into a lot of other things