There are two ways into an Avistra website. The bar in the lower right is for the page you are looking at: change the words on it, or send us anything else. The Dashboard is the other one: a page of its own where everything your site keeps lives, with a list down the left, the way you would expect. This note is the tour. If you have not opened the tool before, How to make edits on an Avistra website shows the sign-in.
The bar and the Dashboard
Sign in and a small bar appears in the lower right of every page: Make an edit, Dashboard, Support request, and the dots.
- Make an edit is for what is in front of you. Change the words on the page, or send a picture of what you want changed. How to make edits on an Avistra website covers it.
- Support request is for everything else: a new page, a new section, a question. How to submit a support request on an Avistra website covers that.
- Dashboard opens the page this note is about.
- The dots hold Page settings for the page you are on, your Request log, Security, and Sign out.
The Dashboard is a page at its own address, and it is private: it is never in search results, never cached, and asks you to sign in if you arrive at it cold.
What is down the left
A dark list down the side, grouped the way the work is.
- Home, the overview below.
- Members: People and Membership.
- Activity: Events, Email and anything else your site does.
- Money: Payments, and the Store and Donations if you have them.
- Website: your Insights or whatever your site's writing is called, and the Request log.
- Settings: Security, Admins and Webhooks.
At the foot are Support request, Back to the site and Sign out.
You only see the parts your site actually has, and the parts your own access reaches. Somebody who looks after events opens the Dashboard and sees Events, not your members' payment history. How to give somebody access to your website covers who sees what.
Home: what needs you
Home is the overview, and it opens with Needs you when something is waiting: applications to decide, a payment that failed, an edit request, emails waiting to go out. When there is nothing, the block is not there at all.
Under it, in whatever order fits your site:
- Membership: how many are active, how many are due to renew, and a twelve-month line of where the numbers have been.
- Renewals coming up, in the next thirty days.
- Upcoming events, with how many have registered against the limit.
- Money by month, a bar for each of the last twelve.
- Recent gifts, Store and Open polls, if you have them.
- Website, the last edits and support requests.
Every figure is a link. Press the number of renewals and you land in the list of those people, already filtered.
Opening a module
Choose anything in the list and it opens beside the list, filling the page. It is the same panel it has always been, in the same place every time, so nothing moves around under you. Closing it brings you back to Home.
Each module keeps its own address, so you can bookmark People or Events and go straight there next time.
On your phone
The list folds into a menu at the top, and everything else stays where it is. The door page for checking people in at an event is built for a phone in the first place: How to sell tickets and check people in.
A word about speed
The Dashboard remembers what it has just loaded for a short while, so going back to a list you were on a moment ago is instant, and it quietly fetches a fresh copy behind what you are reading. Anything you change is written straight away, and the remembered copies are dropped, so you are never looking at your own stale work.
If you get stuck
Send it to us. Choose Support request, in the bar or at the foot of the Dashboard, and say what you need. How to submit a support request on an Avistra website shows how.