It's always fun to announce The Next Big Thing, some great advance in the way we go about our lives, like the segway, sliced bread, or the taming of fire. Alas, my role is not quite that of Prometheus, but of Otto Frederick Rohwedder. This week's release includes a couple of seemingly-facile features that, like Mr. Rohwedder's glorious invention, could make your life -- or at least your event-planning -- so much easier. We've made a lot of 'little' upgrades to the Events HQ over the last few weeks, ranging from standardizing the way we referred to follow-up emails to adding a field for 'Location Name.' But those don't quite compare to the following features of our 1.8.4 release, which are, if I may be so bold, the greatest thing since...you know. You can find a complete list of the 22 changes here.

Purchasing Multiple Tickets

Salsa has long allowed your supporters to not only sign up for an event but to include guests as well. Unfortunately, the supporter had to sign up their guests at the same time they did. So, if she completed the process and bragged to all her friends about "this amazing event I'm going to" (adding, of course, the equivalent vocal inflection of "!!!!!!!!," which would convince them that they, too, need to attend) the friends could not be added to her party. They'd have to sign up individually.

No longer. Now, your supporter can return to the event page and sign up further guests. Depending on her browser and cookie settings, the page may remember her and it'd be as easy clicking two buttons and supplying the appropriate information. Even if she has cleared her cookies, if she signs up again, Salsa will alert her that she's already registered and provide a link where she can log in and add the extra guests.

Default Zoom of Google Maps

GPS makes our lives easier, potentially more interesting and, perhaps, just a little bit creepier. Foursquare may let you know when to rob my house, but at least I no longer have to ask for directions at the gas station. Still, there are those of us that like to live in the halcyon days prior to automatic navigation systems, where we planned out routes by highlighting highways in a Rand McNally atlas. All right, I never actually did that, because I started driving around the time Al Gore invented the internet and just looked it up online. (Sense of machismo...preserved!) Salsa has the ability to save your event attendees this last step by automatically including a Google map on your event registration page.

However, in these pre-Skynet days, technology doesn't always know what's best. Sometimes these maps would zoom in way too far, to the point where the you'd already need to know the cross streets. Other times, the map would only be precise enough to inform the supporter that the event is being held somewhere in Eastern Montana. We've added a drop down to the Event workflow (you can find it under the "Address" section) that lets you manually control the level of zoom on the map. This also works on distributed events. This probably won't prevent the invention of the T-800, but it couldn't hurt.

Both of these features were suggested by you, our Salsa users, as were many of the other fixes and features. If there are further developments that would make your life easier, please let us know by emailing the regular support channels. Or, better yet, add your ideas to our previous post soliciting suggestions or directly to Salsa Commons.