Second quarter recap

Welcome to a new quarter! Over the last three months, we launched new features and improvements at an impressive pace, even as we continued to focus on wrapping up the modernization of community sites (more on that below). We also enjoyed the official start of summer, and we hope you and your community are enjoying the activities and holidays summer brings!

With so many improvements, we're excited to dive into this quarter's recap! Keep reading to discover our favorite updates from the past three months, and be sure to check out the full changelog for the improvements that didn't make the cut.

🎉 Modernized community sites rollout

Our biggest and most exciting news: after extensive testing and polishing, we've promoted the modernized community sites out of beta and are slowly rolling the new version out to customers! Modernizing every piece of our software stack was an ambitious project we began about eight years ago, and is concluding with the rollout of the modernized community sites. To be clear, this has not been our engineering team's sole focus by any means! We intentionally worked on this project slowly and steadily while spending most of our time actively releasing new features and improvements (as showcased by our recap blog posts).

The modernized community sites are a complete rewrite of the underlying technologies that power community websites, not a visual redesign of the websites—aside from some minor polishing touches throughout. The modernization lays the groundwork for our engineering team to build many of the most popular feature requests by replacing older technologies with next gen technologies that enable significantly faster software development. At the completion of the rollout, expect to see the already rapid pace of feature releases accelerate even faster!

🔁 Repeating blast emails

Make recurring announcements and reminders completely hands-off with the new ability for blast emails to repeat automatically! Similar to calendar events, blast emails can be configured to repeat weekly, biweekly, monthly, or yearly. Helpfully, the next occurrence of a repeating blast email will appear in the list of communications as a scheduled email—allowing you to preview, edit, or reschedule it as necessary before it’s sent.

🔒 Default page restrictions

Never forget to restrict a new page again! We've introduced default restrictions for new pages, which are automatically applied whenever a page is created. As always, a page's restrictions can be customized as needed at any point after the page is created.

🔔 Reminder to choose password

Our platform now nudges new members to choose a password if they haven't chosen one yet, which might happen for imported members or members added by another in their household. This one-time reminder occurs automatically after 5 days, and helps encourage new members to view and interact with your community's website using their new account. No need to set this reminder up—it's automatically active!

➡️ Duplicate surveys

A nice time saver: you can now quickly duplicate an existing survey to use as a starting point for creating a new survey! Want to give it a try? Look for the button in the “Duplicate” column when viewing the list of surveys in the Admin Portal.

📎 Attachments cloned with emails

We made a small, helpful improvement to the process of duplicating blast emails. Now, any attachments sent with the original blast email will be automatically duplicated to the new blast email—no need to reupload manually!

📍 Location note for "inside" addresses

When adding or editing an address that’s “inside your community,” the dropdown for picking “inside” vs. “outside” will now display your community’s location in parentheses appended to the "inside" choice. Because the location details (e.g., city, state, and ZIP code for U.S. communities) are already known for addresses within your community, they don't need to be re-entered by members or admins. By displaying this location upfront, it adds extra clarity to the process of adding/editing addresses.

🖋 Blog posts

Stepping into the role of a website administrator might seem daunting, but it doesn't need to be! To help new admins start on solid footing, our customer success team wrote a helpful guide for anyone taking on new administrative responsibilities for their community's website. Plus, in one of our favorite series of blog posts, we put the spotlight on Taylor—our newest customer success champion!

Wrapping up

It's nearly impossible to convey just how excited our whole team is by the rollout of the modernized community sites! The modernization effort across our entire software stack has been the largest project ever tackled by our engineering team. We'll be progressing the rollout over the coming weeks while continuing to make polishing touches, so please let us know if you have any feedback.

As always, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn and Threads, watch our changelog, and read our blog for all the latest happenings here at HOA Express.

Until next time.