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Change log
This page gives a brief overview of recent key changes that you might notice or need to know about.
Staff can now restrict parent / guardian accounts to prevent the account password from being changed.
Individual pupil exports now show the date of the most-recently saved subject report on the pupil page and in the footer of the report.
The Terms and Conditions have been updated in line with the imminent General Data Protection Regulation.
Until now, tasks had a single primary owner who was responsible for the status of each report. Contributors could be defined to provide additional input to reports, but their powers were limited.
The Contributor setup is unchanged, as many find this useful, but it is now possible to select multiple owners for a task. This will support true job-sharing.
We have tidied up the export presentation of “grid-style” grade field outputs.
- Vertical centring
- Previously, the text was aligned to the top of the cell, so that multi-lined titles would result in an ugly output. The cell contents are now vertically centred to resolve this.
- Cell borders
- You can now select a cell border colour for these tables. The default moves from no border to a pale grey, but you can choose to revert to no border if you prefer. This is set via the export layout page.
An example of both fixes is shown below. The border colour shown is Grey40, which is darker than the new default Grey20 to make it clear in the example; and yes, I know there is no number 5 in the example…
Many of our schools export their report decks to CSV format and use mail merge to generate reports that look exactly as they want.
There is now a new option for CSV generation: CSV by format. The default is by subject, where there is a set of CSV columns for each subject which works well when most pupils take most subjects. The new setting is better for situations where this is not the case, such as A-level options where most pupils will take three or four subjects from the school subject offering.
If you use the same format for all subject reports and use this new setting, your CSV file will be arranged with the minimum number of sets of columns grouped by format with a “subject” column added. This will allow mail-merge template construction without lots of blank pages.
Clever use of groups (e.g. three- and four-subject pupils) could help even further in reducing blank pages.
Our backend server code is written in the Python language. We have now upgraded from Python 2 to Python 3, a major step that will allow us to benefit from future upgrades and improvements rather than being left behind on the old version.
You should notice no change, although initial testing suggests the system is just a little bit faster still!
It can take a long time to create a new session by copying the structure of a previous session. This has occasionally led to timeout errors, partial completion and so on.
This processing now takes place in the background, advising you when it is complete:
We now support non-binary gender identification for pupils. Pupils can be added individually or via copy-and-paste with a gender assignment of “N” for non-binary. This will show as a ~ in the pupil list.
As you are probably aware, the system has a handy copy reports shortcut when creating reports for similarly-performing pupils. This replaces names and pronouns as appropriate: James gets replaced with Jane and he gets replaced with she.
Gender blurring complicates this: persons who do not identify with a single gender often choose an alternative to he/she and many conventions and proposals are in their infancy.
For such pupils, we assume the they form as a starting point, but you can change this to use custom pronouns as that pupil prefers via the pupil details page.
These pronouns will then be substituted in/out of copied reports from pupils with traditional (cis) gender assignment and from non-binaries using different pronoun conventions.
Two changes requested by our schools:
Pupil images on export cover sheet
If you upload pupil photos (pupil list » details), you can set up your export layout to include the pupil image on the cover sheet of the report.
Export by teacher
This one was requested for proof-reading: you can now select a teacher when exporting, and the export file will only contain reports for tasks owned by that teacher. Note that contributions to other non-owned tasks won’t be included; others’ contributions to owned tasks will be included.
And one for the nerds…
This will interest almost no-one, but we’re now coming at you over HTTP/2 if your browser supports it. On media-heavy sites this can make a big performance improvement — as we’re already super-slim, it has little effect but is still the right thing to do.
Parents with more than one child at a school can now use the same email address for each pupil account. Previously this would result in an error. Note that a distinct password must be used for each account if logging on with the email address as the username.
Sessions can now have parent access permanently turned off: useful if you are doing a set of “internal” reports that you do not want to be made available to parents ever.
Subdomains are here! If you are an admin, under your school menu, you will find a link to the subdomain page.
This allows you to set up https://myschool.matrep.co.uk
as your login page, which looks neat and integrated and avoids the need for
entering your school code number.
CSV export now supports special characters: accented letters, bullet points and other extended characters. Previously, these had been “sanitized” — for example, an em-dash was replaced with three hyphens — but now the real character is included.
This may cause issues with older versions of Excel, and you will need to ensure that any processing of the CSV file you do (mail merge) can accommodate any special characters you may have used in your report text.
When you make changes to a format field, the system checks through all affected reports to see if they are still valid under the new settings; if they are not, the reports are moved to In Progress.
However, if you had a lot of reports, the process could take too long and an error was generated. As of today, though, this process is performed in the background freeing you to get on with things.