Version 8.23

Upgrade Time

The upgrade time from version 8.22 varies depending on the number of patrons in the database - it may take a little time.

There are MANDATORY web page changes that must be made before upgrading. If you do not do this, your web sales will not run until the web pages are updated as per the instructions at the bottom of this page

This is a walk around install

Key Changes in Version 8.23.03

The following changes have been made to Theatre Manager since version 8.22

Multi-Language Web Page Capability

A few venues have asked for the capability of allowing patrons to buy using various languages and this version provides that capability. There are some things that each venue must do in this upgrade to web pages, regardless if they wish this feature or not. Specifically:

You must make a copy of your 'WebPages' folder and call it 'WebPagesEN'
You must read the 'what a venue has to to' section and put all web page changes in place BEFORE upgrading.
If you wish to implement other languages, you can simply duplicate the WebPagesEN folder (and rename it to WebPagesFR, for example) and make any language translations that you wish in the web pages and error messages.
And then you can indicate to the web listener which languages you wish to support by editing default data

If language is implemented, TM stores the current language in the patron's cookie, so it will remember language for the entire day. When somebody logs in, it will save the language preference for the patron. Next time they make a web purchase, once they log in, their language preferences will take effect. The default is 'EN' for English.

Selling Courses Online

Events that are set up as courses may now be sold online. This has introduced a small change to the sales process for courses online that some venues may find useful. These are:

There is a new default registration page that pulls information from different parts of Theatre Manager and shows the course marketing notes. This allows for some possible future customization regarding the selling process and capturing of additional information. For now, it is used purely to display more information on the course.
The quantity of attendees in a course registration is 1 (instead of the standard default of 2 for other ticket sales)
When the item is in the shopping cart and after a patron has logged in, TM will prompt the patron for the name of the person in the household who will be attending the course prior to checkout. This means that you can only buy a course for a member of the household at this time.

Events

There is an additional default web setting on the 'performance detail-Web Tab' where you can now 'suggest' the default number of tickets to buy for an event. For most types of sales, this defaults to 2 tickets. For courses, this defaults to 1 attendee. It can be changed for any performance.
Only show reserved seating performances on the map window on play record.
Adding patrons to an event to create a volunteer record now checks the patron availability and advises if the volunteer will be away.

Patrons

On the web, the 'account' button will now show all members of the household to the left of the web page. The patron can update and manage the names and addresses of other household members - much like managing travelling companions on an airline reservation web site. At this time, only existing household members can be changed. A future release will allow adding new household members.
Fixed a rare condition in the patron merge process where it could give an RQL error if there is a performance with no event record. This could only occur under rare circumstances on a converted version 6 database.

Facility Management

For meetings that involve your patrons and other staff members, you can now send meeting invitations. These will send standard '.ics' meeting requests that iCal and Outlook will recognize.
People receiving meeting invitations can accept and reject the meetings.
For iCal, those meeting messages are sent to a special email (set up in default data) that acts as a broker for meeting requests. You can use a menu option to have Theatre Manager to check that email address to retrieve meeting invitations that have been responded to.
- In subsequent versions on TM, this will be a task handled by the web listener.
- Getting Outlook to respond to meeting requests will be in a subsequent version of TM (outlook is more finicky)
If people change their meeting status, additional notifications will appear for the creator of the meeting
Fixed some spacing issues on the calendar display window
Notification list window no longer forces you to acknowledge meeting invitations and other upcoming events before dismissing the window. You still must acknowledge/read system messages from the startup process.
Added sending of attachments to email files for purpose of meeting invitations. It is only available for this purpose at this time.
Added passive alarm notification as an option. You can now indicate that alarms are only to go into the notification list and users can read at their leisure.

The Sales Process

There was an issue with voiding a refund if the authorization was one of the first three transactions. Now, voiding a refund will always be allowed, regardless if it is for the first, second or third payment after beginning sales for the day.
Fixed a bug that allowed you to sell a ticket to a hold you did not have access to. You can no longer do this.
When 'Force Dup' is used for a credit card authorization, TM now tracks the credit card in the audit transaction log as an 'AT' transaction. This means you can search the audit log if you are out of balance. (There are more end of day analysis tools planned for this in the future).
Fix an issue booking a ticket in a section where there are no active price codes. TM now prevents the sale if it cannot find any available price code.
The error message on a delete of a payment is now more descriptive - to assist the end user determining what to do
Fixed the text of an error message that incorrectly displayed the number of subscription packages that will be renewed incorrectly
When assigning a volunteer/staff member to an event or on the calendar, it now checks the volunteer time availability and advises if patron should be assigned to the event.
Prevent a crash entering a matching gift where the user types the patron number of a company that does not match gifts
Refunds no longer require the CVV2/CID number to be entered as it is not required. That means you can require employees enter CID/CVV2, but it will not affect the capability of providing refunds.
Self Assigned control numbers can now be swiped from commercial style gift cards that are encoded in the mag stripe with %Bxxxxxxxx^......

Other Web Changes

Fixed a possible loop situation that causes a listener to appear hung
No longer place messages in the order notes. Those re found in the web listener logs in more detail.

PCI Compliance

The PCI certification is an evolving process, changing and getting stronger as the years roll on. We have made some changes here that you may need to be aware of.

Theatre Manager is PABP 1.4 certified and our certification expires december 2010. The replacement to PABP process is called PA DSS and we have started the PA DSS 1.2 certification process well in advance of this deadline. We expect that we will be certified at the end of the summer
On a PC, you may want to upgrade apache to version 2.2.15.
On both OSX and PC, there are some changes that can be made to the httpd and httpd-ssl files to tighten the security in response to new PCI compliance scans

Accounting Changes

Only Posted GL entries can be exported as a control against preventing people exporting and then changing them.
Exported GL entries can no longer be un-posted which means they cannot be changed. Instead, reversing entries need to be made. These make for a stronger audit trail.
Changing the internal account number will reformat the external account number
Updated the export of GL entries to Banner to reflect revised XML requirements
Added a new icon and colour to any not-yet-deposited payment that was authorized using the Force Duplicate option. This should highlight payments that might cause possible out of balance situations in end of day
Allow the user to edit a not-yet-deposited payment and put a new credit card number or expiry date on a payment
The accounting tab in the tax rate window now shows any postings to those tax accounts

Miscellaneous Changes

Merchant accounts now have two 'allow to use' options. One of them is for the box office and the other is for the web. This allows you to have multiple merchant accounts and use specific ones for web sales and others for the box office.
Adjust some defaults when duplicating merchant accounts depending on the software type. Specifically, duplicating an orbital account will reset the next transaction number and the ping server options
Fix to prediction of the area code for a phone number.
Fix some spelling errors on tooltips and help
Prevent creation of duplicate email addresses that could occur under very rare conditions
All patron emails are reviewed and any with some special characters like % or single/double quote will have their email password re-randomized. This addresses a situation where a % followed by a digit cannot be sent to the listener as a password because it is a special web combination of characters. People who had such a combination in their web passwords could not log in to the web listener.
Fixed a slow startup situation. Theatre Manager checks for the internet being available so that credit cards can be authorized, email address domains can be verified and to check for upgrades. Arts Management's static ip was changed by our ISP after 10 years... and this affected everybody.
Fixed a possible crash on Mac OSX if the database connection was interrupted and TM needed to reconnect to the database. There was an issue deep in the Postgres reconnection code that has been addressed that now allows reconnection to be attempted without a crash.
Improved progress display on the upgrade process so that it does not look like TM is hung while inserting a new field into a table with a lot of rows.
Fixed an issue with the 'Verify Subscription Holds' process. The list of performances was not displaying properly
Enhanced the update process so that a venue can pick the version they want to download and for Mac and PC. This means that you can log into any version of TM and grab the current Mac or PC version, regardless of platform.
Changed the startup process so that if a version of TM is out of date or is missing some components, TM will prompt the user and download the current version that they should be running rather than simply say the components are out of date. This should reduce need for phone support.
Credit card payment types must now be one of a recognized set. You can no longer have MC (master card) and MC1 (for a second master card) in the same merchant. They must be unique to each merchant account

Specific Unicode version changes

This version of Theatre Manager is in limited release at this current time - and will become the default version of Theatre Manager in a month or so

Now supports email SMTP server authentication using MD5/Cram
Minor changes for Paymentech Orbital authorizations
The Web Listener will now search for an available port starting at the default port (eg starting at 5111) until it finds one that is not in use. This is to support running multiple listeners on a single machine and/or multiple copies of TM in terminal services

Things a venue may need to do

Read all prior release notes back to the version you upgraded from and follow any instructions for each version under the subject 'Things a venue may need to do'
If you have multiple merchant accounts (for outlet version, or if you have converted from one software type to another), you will need to go into each merchant account you have and enable/disable them from use at the box office, or on the internet as appropriate.
Please refer to Recommended Apache config changes for PCI to see if any of the patches apply to your venue
Compare the new standard web pages and make the required changes as per below in the htdocs folder

Changes to Web Pages

Make a copy of the WebPages folder and name it WebPagesEN. Do this and make ALL changes below in the WebPagesEN folder before upgrading Theatre Manager to version 8.23.00. Please download the web page updates and compare the web pages in the WebPagesEN folder with with the template files in this mini archive. If you have not made any changes from prior versions, you may need to get the full set of standard web pages and compare them.

Note: on PC Apache servers, please find all files called '.ds_store' and delete those for PCI compliance.

Files in the main WebPagesEN directory
TMattendance.html	replace entire file
TMcart.html	include dropDownMenuFunction at top of page and add an ID to the FORM tag
TMcheckout.html	include dropDownMenuFunction at top of page and add an ID to the FORM tag. Change code for F_HTML_MERCHANT_LIST (compaer old page to new)
TMlogin.html	compare old page to new - turn 'autocomplete=off' on password fields
TMloginSelectPatron.html	compare old page to new - turn 'autocomplete=off' on password fields
TMpasswordChange.html	compare old page to new - turn 'autocomplete=off' on password fields
TMpasswordResetChange.html	compare old page to new - turn 'autocomplete=off' on password fields
TMpatronNew.html	compare old page to new
TMpatronUpdate.html	compare old page to new
tmError.txt	additional error message number 10153
tmFee Directory
tmOrderFee.html	compare old page to new
tmOrderFeeDefault.html	compare old page to new
tmGifs
langxx.gif	add all files starting with lang to your tmGif folder
tmMaps
TMticketsSection_MapDefaultc.html	new file used for description of courses
tmScripts
dropDownMenuFunction.html	new file used for change of course attendee and chnaging of merchant on checkout
tmTemplates
rowPatronEmail.html	compare old page to new. Variable called F_HTML_ALLOW_PASSWORD_CHANGE
rowPatronEmailLimitedProfile.html	compare old page to new
setMERCHANT_LIST.html	replace page
tmnavButtons.html	(optional) add the code for <!--#include virtual="tmTemplates/tmnavLanguages.html" --> inside the form if you want to do multi language
tmLoginForm.html	replace file
setCCMONTH_LIST.html	new file
setCCMONTH_LISTempty.html	new file
setHOUSEHOLD_PATRON_LIST.html	new file
setHOUSEHOLD_PATRON_LISTempty.html	new file
setHOUSEHOLD_PATRON_SELECTION_LIST.html	new file
setHOUSEHOLD_PATRON_SELECTION_LISTempty.html	new file
tmnavLanguages.html	new file - update for the languages you want to support
rowCartCourse.html	new file
rowCartCourseNewGroup.html	new file
rowCheckoutCourse.html	new file
rowFutureTicketCourse.html	new file
rowFutureTicketPrintCourse.html	new file
rowOldCartCourse.html	new file
rowOldCartPrintCourse.html	new file
constantALLEVENTS.txt	new file - edit if using multi language
constantALLVENUES.txt	new file - edit if using multi language
constantALLYEARS.txt	new file - edit if using multi language
constantMONTHS.txt	new file - edit if using multi language
constantYESNO.txt	new file - edit if using multi language
constantNEWPATRON.txt	new file - edit if using multi language

Theatre Manager 8.23.00 Released

There is a major release for all venues running version 8 of Theatre Manager.

See the full notes about Version 8.23 or read on for a summary.

Key Changes in Version 8.23

The web module now supports serving pages in multiple languages.
Courses/Classes can now be sold on line. Each course can have its own registration information/sales page (similar to general admission and reserved seating options) that can provide more specific information to the course registrant. This feature also allows the purchaser to assign any member of their household to take the course instead of it always being assigned to the purchaser - meaning simply that a parent can buy and register a child.
Web purchasers can now edit information for any member of their household connected to the account. This is much like being able to manage travellers in the household in an airline web site.
The Facility Management module continues to gain more functionality. This version brings includes additional functions such as scheduling meetings in Theatre Manager and emailing ICS files that iCal and Outlook understand. This means a patron can auto-insert meetings into their own calendars.
There have been a number of small tweaks to the sales process regarding credit card authorization and when cvv2 numbers should be requested. There are also some important employee permission fixes.
This version strengthens future PCI compliance. Note that Theatre Manager is scheduled for its own PA DSS 1.2 compliance audit with the intent of receiving approval by the end of summer. Theatre Manager's current PABP 1.4 certification expires in December 2010.
Credit card processing via Paymentech Orbital is now an option. This service provider was chosen for its worldwide capabilities.
There have been two changes to address specific crashes that occur under OSX

This is a walk around install.

Also note that there are 38 web page changes must be made prior to installing this version to avoid some web pages not working. Most are new pages and about 6 are important changes to existing pages. Please do not install this version without doing the web page changes first.