Changelog 018: Introducing BoardScribe Pro

Steve: We’re live.

William: Looks like it, according to the red button.

Steve: All right. How’s it going, William? Doing good?

William: I’m good. Going good. No complaints, except the weather, but-

Steve: The weather. Kind of rainy in Scotland?

William: Yeah, getting stormy. Definitely autumn time.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, totally. It’s getting cold here, so it’s that fall chill hits and then we’re in for the winter.

William: Yep.

Steve: Cool. A lot of things been happening over the last month, right?

William: Yeah, been busy, nonstop.

Steve: Yeah. Let me check and make sure everything’s up and running the way it should be. Looks like we are live on YouTube.

And the other social channels. Cool. All right. Is the lighting too harsh on me? I got the window open.

William: Just natural light doesn’t-

Steve: Yeah.

William: Doesn’t suit you.

Steve: It doesn’t suit me.

William: Me neither.

Steve: I could shut that window and make it a little better.

William: Seems fine.

Steve: Cool.

All right, so we got some people joining in. Hey, I know these people.

Amber and Chris, thanks for joining. It’s good to have the team here.

William: Yeah, Chris, you gotta get a real YouTube name.

Steve: Yeah.

Cool. Yeah.

[00:01:57] Introduction

Steve: Welcome to the changelog livestream. I’m gonna be careful not to call it the Accessibility Checker changelog because today-

William: Yeah.

Steve: … It’s not the Accessibility Checker changelog livestream, it’s the BoardScribe Pro changelog livestream. So do you really have a changelog with version one?

William: The free version got an awful lot of changes to support this.

Steve: Yeah, totally. Cool.

For those that don’t know, you wanna give a little bit of background, like, on the free version that we released a couple months ago?

William: Yeah. So we’ve released BoardScribe. It is a full-featured, board meeting management platform. Handles, all kinds of your documents, PDFs, Word docs, whatever kind of documentation that might go along with council meetings, board meetings, government meetings. Any kind of official meeting probably fits inside of BoardScribe. The free version, the pro feature, or the pro version had some additional features, but yeah, the free version is enough for what most people are gonna need, I believe.

Steve: Yeah. Cool.

Yeah, so we released a free version of BoardScribe a couple months ago on WordPress.org. It’s free for the taking. I would implore anybody looking for a solution to managing their board meeting minutes in an accessible table to go give it a try, download it, check it out.

But today, we are gonna be talking about the new BoardScribe Pro plugin, which, extends all of those features and brings it into a more full-featured, board meeting minute management solution.

What Pro does is it goes a little bit further. We implemented a thing called Documents, and we will dive into what document, what we mean by documents, locations, groups, so these are like some taxonomies that come, pre-built and I think one of them is preceded with some term.

William: One of them has some defaults.

Steve: Yeah.

William: Like special mean, regular mean.

There’s one other one, but-

Steve: Yeah …

William: It escapes me.

Steve: Yeah.

William: Work session apparently, according to what’s on my screen right now.

Steve: Yeah. So we have extra columns, and we have more layouts and it just extends it and gives you that premium touch that you get from premium plugins.

What we’re gonna do is I’ve put together kind of a fictional library board, and with just a handful of meeting minutes and stuff just to display the plugin and to help us facilitate, walking through the features that we’ve added in Pro.

[00:05:09] Front-end Views

Steve: And we could first start by the visual side, ’cause that’s what everybody wants to see first, and then we’ll dive into the editor and look at it in the back end.

Let me pull up my screen here.

Okay, so the front-end view.

If you’ve used our free plugin, this should look a little bit familiar. If not, it has several additional columns here.

In free you get the Title, the Date, the Agenda, and the Minutes. Correct?

William: Yes, those four fields.

Steve: With Pro, we’ve gone ahead and extended that out to, Location, Livestream, Recordings, Closed Caption Transcripts, and Documents.

And documents is a interesting feature that gets shared throughout the Agendas, the Meeting, the Minutes, and the Documents columns.

The Document column is kinda interesting too, because it’s a loop. You can add as many supporting documents into there as you like.

William: Yep. But we don’t know exactly how many different handouts are gonna be delivered as part of whatever meeting is.

If it’s a board meeting, it might be executive summaries. It could be anything.

Steve: Yeah.

William: Homework.

Steve: And what you’re looking at here is the default, table view. So this is our default table template that comes with the plugin.

William: I will call it, this is not actually default. So these additional columns are not on by default.

Steve: What I mean by default is, the default display.

William: This is… Yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

William: So this is the standard table.

Steve: Yeah.

William: No configuration really, other than extra columns.

Steve: And in our previous livestream, I don’t remember if it was the last livestream or the one before where we kinda introduced BoardScribe, we kinda talk about some of our reasoning around making this plugin and why we felt it needed to be a solution that we made to implement these in a more accessible way.

Because through a lot of our work that we do with audit and remediation clients, we found that these board meetings minutes were quite problematic, and had a lot of accessibility issues that we were remediating, kinda doing the same thing over and over for different clients.

William: Yeah, I’ve been working on this for so long, I forgot the reason we did this was because we couldn’t find accessible tables in other solutions.

Steve: Yeah, so we operated under the rules of three. Once we got to the third client where we were doing the same thing, making a custom solution for the third one, we’re like, “This needs to be rolled out into its own product and something that we can use for our clients, and that we can make available for everybody else.”

With Pro, we’ve added some more templates. So we now have a list view. This is just like a standard list, and we’ve made sure to output this in an accessible way. As you go down, it announces the number of items in the list. When you get into nested lists, it announces the correct numbers there to help give screen reader users context to where they are.

But creating a list view was a quick recommendation that we got after releasing free. ‘Cause sometimes you just want to show things in a list and not in a table.

William: Quite quick in vision, but not so quick to build, it turns out.

Steve: No. No. So as you can see, things are just laid out with labels, and then the values next to those labels.

And as you go down… you can see some have a location defined and some have, like a virtual meeting defined with a link off to the virtual meeting. So this is the list view.

Anything to add to the list view, William?

William: Maybe we’ll circle back to this, but the decision that it was just lists and not definition lists was interest and rabbit hole to fall into.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a fun accessibility nuance and definition lists have their place, I think, and, it seems that they… The definition list is interesting to use for a layout purposes, but, I don’t know if it’s always semantically correct in that the screen reader always interprets it in the most elegant way.

So we decided to stick with basic nested lists here with a little bit of input from Amber on what the best solution was there. So this is our new list view, and then we have our timeline view. You want to talk about timeline view? This was your work.

William: Yeah. So one of our clients needed a table per year, hence the timeline name.

It is reversed chronologically, so latest first. Each year gets its own table, so you can browse a year per time. You do lose some of our other settings that are available for the blocks in the back end when you’ve used this view because it doesn’t make sense to pick and choose different numbers.

But yeah, that is the long and short of this. One of our clients needed to display their board meetings by year. This is a straightforward solve for this. It’s just, it’s built right in.

Previous solutions we had when we had this on other client websites before we built this plugin into what it is now, we had to create these lists each one at a time. And every time a new year rolls around, someone has to remember to go back in, build next year’s list. You just don’t have to do that. We can solve that, and we did. That’s what this solves.

Steve: Yeah, and I think we had, on the free plugin we had a support request come in for a similar solution to this, and I think the temporary fix was for them to use multiple blocks or shortcodes inside of a tab block. Which that’s still an option. You can still do that, and the plugin provides that flexibility for you can output what you want where you want it.

But we thought it would be good to generate a template for this as well. So you can see we’ve got 2026 as a heading, and then we got a table for 2026.

If I scroll down, I’ve got quite a few entries in here with long… And then you can see I got 2025. If I had more years it would just continue to go on and in a full timeline view.

[00:12:44] Custom Styling

Steve: These look basic, your basic tables, and what we’ve tried to do is we’ve tried not to make a lot of opinionated decisions around design, ’cause we really want you to put this into your website and shape it to kinda match your own website theme.

William: This is a basic design because the theme it’s in is basic.

Steve: Yes.

William: It won’t inherit styles from your theme, which was our intention. So if you have a theme that is brightly colored, those colors will be inherited here. If you have different fonts, different tab- if you have striped styles on your tables, those will be inherited, and they will output… it will look like your theme. It will fit, and that was intentional. So while this one here looks plain, the theme is very plain.

Steve: Plain, yeah, yeah.

William: I wish I’d picked a different theme on my test site, but my test site is using the same theme, so.

Steve: Yeah.

William: Looks just the same.

Steve: But you can style it. So I’ve put together a quick styled version of it.

And this is using the new, so if I go to the editor and I click on the block, and I just go down here to advanced, the additional CSS field, I’ve just placed in some CSS here to style this how I like.

Now we do have some future plans to build styles into our block itself, but those have to be implemented very carefully because we have multiple templates, and styles can differ between the different templates, and we have to decide the best implementation of that.

But that is a future feature that we are looking into already. But like William says, it’ll either inherit what your theme already has, and I’m using what? Twenty-twenty five. And which is a very vanilla plain theme.

Or you can go in here and you can just write some CSS to make your own styles. And our table outputs with classes that you can target as well if you wanna target it from any CSS file in your theme.

So I thought we would show that a little bit, what it looks like, when it’s prettied up a little bit.

[00:15:22] Adding a Meeting

Steve: Let’s take a look at the back end now that we’ve gone through the front end.

Let’s see. Adding a meeting. How do we add meetings? Should we walk through kind of the new things that come with Pro before we dive into adding a meeting?

William: Yeah, I guess we can. In the sidebar we have a couple of new entries. We have groups and types, which are both taxonomies that can be assigned directly to any of the meetings you create.These work like standard WordPress taxonomies. You can use them to filter on the front end. The block has full filter capabilities, so you can use these to group specific meetings for output or just to show what type the meeting is as dependent on what your organization meetings look like.

The next item down is the types. It’s another taxonomy. This one’s completely freeform, comes with… but one of these is completely freeform-

Steve: Yeah.

William: … One of them isn’t.

Steve: Groups is completely freeform. You can add… so I’ve added the board of trustees, the finance committee, and policy committee.

Types comes preceded with…

William: Yeah.

Steve: With these-

William: The three.

Steve: Three terms, which are regular meetings, retreat, and special meeting.

William: Yeah, next item then is the documents, all documents item, and this is a standard WordPress editor experience where you can create your documents in lieu of creating a PDF file or a Word document.

You can actually now create just content right on the website. It can be whatever type of content you choose. It has full block editor support, so anything you can create in a page or a post, you could feasibly create for your documents for each of the meetings.

And final new item here is locations, which is a full-featured location manager. Type in addresses, virtual, you can include links, contact information. There’s a whole bunch of fields here that can be prefilled in, and these locations can be assigned to each meeting. So if you have a specific room that you run specific meeting types, you can assign that individually per meeting, or you can, while you’re creating meetings, you can create brand-new locations right inline.

No need to create them in advance, but if you want to reuse them, you generally would make your locations upfront.

Steve: And then in the settings, which we have in the free plugin, the only difference is that there, of course, is a license tab to add your license key and the shortcode builder, we do-

William: It gets the additional fields, the additional types.

Steve: Yep, and the same with the importer. The importer, gets the additional fields as well, and then we have documentation here if you’re creating a CSV file to be imported on how to format it properly for a proper import.

Cool. So let’s let’s jump back and look at adding a meeting minute.

We can first look at one that’s already defined here to get a look of what it looks like in the back end. So before we had the meeting date, and if you don’t define a title will automatically be generated. And that was all there in the free plugin before, but we’ve added more date information, William?

William: Yeah, so no in the free plugin as well as the pro plugin, you can now define a start and an end time, which was interestingly a feature we didn’t consider upfront. None of our prior clients specifically needed a time assigned. But turns out most meetings have times, and we should just provide that. It should. That’s an expected feature that we didn’t expect, so there you go. It’s out now, version 1.2.03, released yesterday or the day before. Depends on where you live. You now can define your start and end times, and it’s fully backwards compatible, and they’re optional fields. If you have an all-day meeting, no need to put them in. Nothing will break if you update, if you don’t have them.

Steve: And you’ve taken a lot of care in the logic that we use to order these to actually consider the start time as well, right?

William: Yes. So if you do not have any start times, ordering will be in order of insertion into your board list.

However, if you have start and end times, your sort will account for what those start and end times were, and any that don’t have start and end times will appear after ones that do.

Or if you invert them, they’ll flip around, and they’ll appear before, but there is handling for order based on time.

Steve: Okay. Cool.

If we go down to the next section, which looks a lot different. So this is where things got interesting when we went from Free to Pro. if you actually go look at our free plugin now and look at some of the screenshots that we have up, you can see what the free plugin looked like before yesterday.

William: Yep.

Steve: But the free plugin actually looks a little bit different, so that’s a little bit of a hint, for Amber if she’s still listening. We need to update those screenshots and to reflect the new changes here.

But in going from the free plugin to the pro plugin, we started bringing in all these other fields and all these other options, and we could just build this in like a traditional like metabox kind of way where we just throw a bunch of fields in, maybe have a little bit of show or hide logic, but we decided to step back a little bit and, kind of-

William: Like they built that-

Steve: You did, yeah.

William: And it was incredibly overwhelming.

Steve: Yeah. And so through some of my testing of that… I felt the friction there when I was testing the UI. This user experience isn’t great, right? it doesn’t feel right. It works, but like it doesn’t feel right. So I step back and I built a prototype on how we could rework these and present this UI to the users that would be intuitive, that would explain the settings that they had set, and just give a more of a polished application-like feel.

Not that we’re just creating a WordPress plugin that just throws a bunch of meta fields at you and you have to figure it out. It’s that we’ve gone through and we’ve curated this UI and we’re presenting it to you in a way that communicates what you’ve done already and easily allows you to add the next things, so you don’t have to jump back and forth between documents and locations where you can actually do all of those things in a seamless workflow on your board meeting minutes.

So that’s a big mouthful. Let’s take a look at what that turned out to be.

Yeah, Amber, said then, that’s funny. Amber said she’s gonna pretend that Steve didn’t just call her out. I didn’t call anybody out, I’m just-

William: We hope we didn’t tell her.

Steve: I’m just… Yeah, we didn’t tell you, yet.

But yeah. So that’s part of making a plugin, is it changes, and new screenshots have to be made all the time, and new documentation has to be created all of the time.

Because we’re not just trying to make a plugin and give it to you. Even if the UI and the UX kind of work, that sure, that’s a great first pass, but we do try to be very thorough in our documentation.

We do try to provide developer documentation so that you can extend our plugins, in any way fit.

[00:24:03] Locations

William: And from a personal opinion side on this, I think this looks an awful lot nicer for me. And from a technical level, this was quite cool to build. This is a nice React options page, so to speak.

This isn’t just fields on fields, this is full React, so you can do interactions, which I guess we’ll see in a second, but there’s some-

Steve: Yeah.

William: Neat things that you can do here that wouldn’t have been easy with standard metaboxes.

Steve: Yeah, totally. So what I thought was the best solution here was to create windows or cards, right? Cards that show you the current status of the thing that you’ve defined. So if you look at location here, you’ve got a card that says the title, it says that it’s a saved location and that it’s an in-person location. And it shows the address, and then we have some action links under that to edit the location, to edit in the editor, which means flipping over to the actual custom post type that holds it and changing it there and, or we can replace it or remove it.

If I hit edit location, it pulls up the edit location box, which is the same box that is used to define the location.

William: Yep, exactly the same fields. Benefit of React is, a shared component.

Steve: Yep. So what we’re doing is we’re popping up a modal that says edit location. You can define all the fields, the name, the type, the area, the address, city, country.

We’ve got public instructions that can be added.Like in this case, the parking is free in the rear lot. The accessible entrance is on the east side of the building. So what we’re doing, and we’re being accessible here, we’re saying, “Hey, you can park in the back. We have an accessible entrance for anybody that needs, that is using a walker or a wheelchair, or that just needs an entrance that’s closer.”

But you can put anything in those instructions fields. And then we have, contact details, which are optional information. You can put a phone number or a email address. So popping this up in a modal here just allows me to edit it right away and then, I could, change this and I can hit save, upload location, and the card will update with my changes, the custom post type updates, and it’s all done in one seamless action right here on, in this same window. But if I actually wanted to jump over and edit this location, I could hit edit in the editor, and it’ll open in a new window, which we did warn users with an icon and with screen reader text that it will open in a new window. So do you wanna walk, this is basically the same thing.

William: This is exactly the same thing. All the exact same fields. You just have a bit more space here-

Steve: Yeah.

William: To fill in.

[00:27:15] Groups and Meeting Types

William: However, one addition is on the right-hand side, you can see there is meetings. I guess I would call this a metabox, but it’s mostly an info box that tells you all the meetings that this is attached to.

So if you wanna go and edit any of those individual meetings, you can click on the links, go and edit them. But it gives you an idea, like if you were to come in here and delete this location, all of those meetings would then lose it. So this is a bit of a safety net, but it’s also useful information for anyone who’s modifying this. Your historical meetings will also be modified.

Steve: So it allows you to have… to define it in one place and use it in multiple places. Yeah. If you’ve ever used, plugins like the Events Calendar, it works similar to this, where you can set a location and reuse it. But since on the meeting you can define it here, and you can see a card on what it is, and when you flip over here, you can see all the meetings that it’s attached to.

But these are… This is a bit of a what we call a post-to-post connection, and you can actually connect this location to other meetings straight from here, William?

William: I can’t see what you’re looking at, so I don’t know because you’re in the way.

Steve: Oh, let me move.

William: Yeah, let’s move this over.

Steve: Let’s move this over. Hold on. We’re at the bottom of the page here. Let me move us to-

Yeah. So I can-

William: Final item here is a semi auto-complete type component where if you start typing in the name of any of your other board means, you can actually just pick it right here and do your connections as needed. So you can make your location here and assign it to many items or you can make it on the individual meeting, or attach it on the meeting.

But yeah, if you change or add a new location, here is the place you’re gonna come to make sure that it gets assigned to all the relevant places.

Steve: Yeah. Cool. So you can attach them there, and then you can see all the ones that are attached, and let me jump back. And then of course, we have the same meeting not held field. This kind of changes the output on the front end.

Let me see if I have an example of it when it’s not held. It’ll say it in one of these fields, right? God, I’d have to look through.

William: Yeah. I don’t have one set up either, sadly. Didn’t think of that.

Steve: But this is a feature from the free plugin that ha-

William: Yeah.

Steve: Has been around. So I can remove this location with the remove button and add another one if I like. So we carried that kind of card UI throughout the rest of the fields as well ’cause what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to give you a consistent user experience all the way down the page, and these cards were very nice for helping surface all the information that you’ve defined.

[00:30:42] Meeting Documents

Steve: So we have meeting documents now.

William: Yeah. And, the free plugin, you do have agendas and minutes, which are links to documents. There’s a bit of an enhancement here for Pro users where you can assign actual Word-scraped documents in addition to just plain text links or media library pics. And yeah, this works almost the same way that the location entry field works.

There’s a modal that appears. It has some options. You click through them.

Steve: Yeah.

William: This is a BoardScribe document in the agenda. So this is an actual post type that we previously showcased how they work. This is an actual post type. You can click on it, you can visit link with a view. You can click to edit it, which will take you to the editor, or you can replace it or remove.

Steve: Yeah. So can you explain why we have this all documents post type, and why we would give them an option to do this instead of just linking a URL?

William: The short answer is that most PDFs are horrible.

Steve: Yeah.

William: And that’s also the long answer. But again, most times agendas or minutes are posted as PDF documents, and the PDFs are notoriously inaccessible for the most part. Not every PDF, but the majority of PDFs I’ve ever looked at are untagged entirely. So they’re basically empty content for people who are blind using a screen reader.

Steve: So I can still add PDFs if I like?

William: You can add the PDF if you would like. Hopefully they’re accessible PDFs, but-

Steve: Yeah. So if I remove that card, and I go to add an agenda, I’m presented with a modal that says, “Add agenda,” and then I have three options. I can select from the media library, I can enter an external URL, or choose a BoardScribe document.

Yeah. So what we had there before was a BoardScribe document. If I wanted to just pull something from the media library, I’d have to one, have something in here.

William: Yeah, no files, but this is a standard media library picker, and it is scoped to just document typesso to speak, so there is…it is not any media library item entirely.

It is just PDFs, DOCX files, presentations.

Steve: Yeah.

William: I can’t remember the full list off the top of my head, but it is document type.

Steve: Yeah. We try to push the images out of the way so that you can get in there and-

William: It makes it easier to find the actual things that you want amongst all of your marketing images, videos, whatnot.

Steve: Yeah. So if I go to enter a URL, we have a URL field. You can type in a URL, like I could just do sample.html. And I could hit save URL, and you can see the card updates that we’re using an external URL, and it shows the URL here. And I can click that and view that URL, or I can replace it or remove it from here.

So if I go to replace, it pops back open that replace agenda modal. And now I’m gonna choose a BoardScribe document. This is the one that was in there before, but you see we get a full list of all of our custom documents that we’ve made in our all documents custom post type.

William: And this is also a lazy search field as well.

So once you’ve typed in some characters, it will filter this list down to just the things you’re looking for if you know the name of the meeting.

Steve: Yep. So say I want that one, I click that, and you can see the card is now updated with the BoardScribe document that I want. So we created this also so that we didn’t have these different points of entry that felt cumbersome or different, that we would have a unified way to make these selections, and also so that we can grow BoardScribe later on to have more options in this replace agenda modal.

If we decide on a new type of document, like a new type of way to attach a document, we wanna be able to have a way to facilitate that through our UI here. What this does is it creates a unified way of doing this all the way down the page here as we go through all these fields. If I’m on minutes, I get the same exact UI. I know what I’m doing. And it allows me to utilize the all documents custom post type throughout all of these fields. They’re not just tied to a certain field, and it gives you endless customization to make an alternative to your PDF document available.

And the reason why a webpage is better than a PDF document is ’cause, it’s should be semantically much better than most PDFs out of the box.

William: It’s also directly on your website. You can share a link to it. You don’t need to give people PDF files, share them around, whatever. It’s just here. You’re looking at the meeting, you can visit the page on the website that has the details you need.

Steve: And like I said, you can still use that PDF if you want. Just go to the media library, select it, and put it in there, and you’re good to go. So agendas and minutes work that way.

If you go down to supporting documents, now we added this as a way to kind of facilitate, we don’t know exactly how you run your board, and we don’t know how you have your minutes. We know that most people are gonna have agendas and minutes. That’s a given. But you may have packets or summaries or additional information for each meeting, and we don’t wanna have to create a custom column for every scenario.

So we’ve created a generalized supporting documents section that allows you to define as many documents as you like. You can see I have two defined here by default. If I go to add document I’m presented with the same add document UI, so this is very familiar. I know what I’m doing now, right?

William: Yep. Everything is the same. All of these features work exactly the same.

You don’t need to learn anything new. The previous iteration of this had a particularly quirky setup for agendas and minutes, and documents were separate. Now it’s just unified. It’s the same. You don’t need to learn every field, and I think it is quite self-intuitive.

So once you learn that one time, it’s exactly the same. Nothing else to learn.

Steve: Yeah. So I just added one of our custom documents here just as an example, and you can see it put it in there, and that this is a BoardScribe document, that its status is published. And, we can reorder these.

I thought this was interesting feature that William added. If I hover over… what do you call that icon?

William: The three dots, I think.

Steve: There’s six dots.

William: But there has to be a name. I-

Steve: There’s six dots, right?

William: I don’t know what the name of the icon is. The dots.

Steve: The little dots that you grab, and you get the hand cursor.

So I can just grab this and drag this to the top so that you can reorder these in any way fit. You don’t have to remove them and re-add them in the order you want. And to keep this accessible, we’ve created kind of an accessible alternative to the drag and drop, which is just up and down arrows to move it between the other documents you have here.

So we’re just giving you that flexibility to reorder this in any way fit.

William: And this is also fully keyboard accessible. So if you move an item down, your focus moves with the item. So you can move an item up or down several times as needed. You don’t need to re-find the item with tabbing.

Steve: Totally. So I’m gonna zoom in a little bit. I’m noticing the screen’s kinda small, but, if I go to add a document if I choose a BoardScribe document that doesn’t exist, like, test, I wanna create a new document.

William: I forgot my list. It was so long ago.

Steve: Yeah. So if I wanna create a new document, I’m just gonna call this Test.

I’m now presented with a plus icon, create test. So if I do that, I now have created a new custom document.

William: It does get published by default, so after you create a document here, it doesn’t move you away because then you would be losing context. But you do have to remember to go and edit the content and add that in.

Steve: Yeah. So if I jump over here, I can go here and I can add my content for that page. If I don’t want it to be published, I could switch it to a draft, hit save, and, if you come over here and update this, then you can see I have the document set as a draft here, and you can see even the URL is showing that it’s in draft status. So you can create these custom documents on the fly inside of the board meeting custom post type.

We’re trying to bring everything to you and all the tools to you in one unified place to do all the things you need to do. Of course, you jump over and you can edit that, but then you’re right back here in this view and can continue on down the page.

We had some talks about maybe bringing in the ability to change the status from here, but for now we’ve left this as a version one. I think it’s fine. They can jump over and change the status, but we may in the future add the ability to modify that here.

William: Yeah. When I first built this, I actually always made these as draft modes, and it turned out to be unexpectedly annoying.

Steve: Yeah.

William: You have to go and publish them afterwards. So having them published by default probably is the lesser of two bad options. Ideally, you can change the status right here. I better make a card for that.

Steve: Yeah, so now that I’ve created this document, I don’t have to jump back to it to change its title though.

I can change the title here, right?

William: Yes. So this does not change the title of the BoardScrape document. This is the input text, which will be the link in the table. So you can set this link text to be whatever you choose.

Steve: So, if I hit edit title, I can edit it here and hit save. This way if you have, like if we look up at like this one, so on supporting documents, if I look at this budget summary, so this is a PDF and when you attach a PDF to any of these fields, it’s gonna come in with its title that it already has. Either the title defined in the media library or the, or-

William: In almost all cases, it’s gonna be just the file name is what people are gonna see on their websites.

Very rarely will someone add a title when they upload the media file.

Steve: Yeah. So in that instance, if you add it and it’s at like a basically like a naked URL as the title, or a URL in plain text, we call it naked URLs. But just a raw URL. You wanna be able to edit that.

So if I had this, if I had example.com/budget/ you know, whatever.pdf, I want to change that. And we give you the ability to change the output title of each of your documents without affecting the title defined in other places. Cool? It’s just another way that we’re facilitating you making these board meetings very accessible and making the titles make sense.

[00:44:11] Video and Accessibility Fields

Steve: So running down the page, we’ve got video and accessibility. You wanna run through these for us, William?

William: Yeah, sure.

First item here in the video and accessibility section is the livestream. We had some back and forth on this, whether you could upload a video or pick a video or not, but if you were to click that add livestream button, Steve, you will see the model, and the only option you have is a link, because a live video can never be a video uploaded to your website.

It wouldn’t be live otherwise. And like this could be like a YouTube link or a Zoom link or wherever you’re gonna be having your livestream. A Zoom join link- a sign-up link. Doesn’t have to actually be live at the moment, but yeah, the only option here is inserting a link. So it doesn’t present you the three options that the others do. It just takes you right to this interface, and this is the same interface you would get otherwise if you were to add a link on any of the other cards.

Steve: Yep. So there was a bit of talk back and forth about, actually there was work done on videos and closed captions and things like that, and we rolled that back a little bit to say, “Hey, let’s get this out. Let’s see how people use it, and let’s see if we get requests for adding videos with closed captions.” But what that does is that opens the door to us making a custom video player.

William: Yes. ‘Cause there is no built into Core fully accessible video player. HTML5 Video is the closest, but it has some downsides as well.

Steve: Yeah. So the keyword in that statement is accessible.

William: Yep.

Steve: So we wanted to… If we were gonna implement a video player that could facilitate you defining the source and defining the closed captions, we also want to be able to present you with a front-end UI on your website that is fully accessible.

So creating a fully accessible video player is a bit of a challenge.

William: I’m trying to enter one of those columns.

Steve: Yeah.

William: It’s a-

Steve: No, yeah, it would have to be a modal of some sort that pops up and we would want to ensure that it’s fully accessible and whether that’s utilizing a library, like Able Player or, some other library or building our own library.

We wanna make sure that if we do go to market with that, and if we do release that, it is a fully accessible solution. So for now, we’re sticking with URLs and that link off to YouTube or to Zoom, like William said.

So the other two here?

William: Yeah, so the next field is the recording field. And again, this is also just an external URL.

It’s not a video to avoid the issues we just referenced. The no accessible out of the box video player is available for us to just drop in here, and only option here is a recording link. You’ll see in this example is a YouTube video, and again, exactly the same interface as all the other cards.

Nothing else to learn here. Just paste your link or type your link in, save it. That will be your recording.

Steve: Yeah. Cool. And then transcript.

William: Yeah, so transcripts was interesting because we did also have closed captions, VTT files, we had a whole bunch of options here, but we did pare it down to just a transcript. And the expectation is it be a text file or some commonly accepted transcripts format. So maybe the SRT or VTT file.

But yeah, you get all three options in this one. You can pick it from the media library, you can enter a URL, or you can choose a BoardScribe document. And BoardScribe documents, because they’re just posts they can contain anything including a transcript, so you could place your transcript there if you chose.

But yeah, these are the three options here. Nice. And again, works exactly the same as every other card.

Steve: Yeah, that’s that continuous familiar UI that we custom-built that works throughout the whole application, and we feel like that gives users a very solid and intuitive way of building their board meeting minutes.

We wanna make this as easy as possible, right? Posting board meeting minutes isn’t the most, I don’t know, what do you call it? Exciting task, but it’s a task that needs to be done nonetheless, and we wanna make it as seamless as possible.

William: I will call out now that you’ve scrolled up a bit on the page and I can see these.

So the meeting date and the meeting time fields don’t look quite as nice as the other cards, and that is intentional actually. So these are just HTML5 date fields and time pickers, so whatever your browser or device presents to you for accessible pickers is what you will see here. So if you visit this page on an iPhone, for example, this might look slightly different.

Steve: Yeah, I do wanna note that interestingly enough in the Restream livestream here, when I click on this, you can’t see the UI.

William: I can’t.

Steve: Yeah.

William: But there is, a UI here.

Steve: So it’s probably because I’m not sharing my whole screen. I’m only sharing the window, and I’m guessing that the time picker window exists outside of that somewhere in the… but we are using native time pickers from the browser, right?

William: Yes, exactly. So everything is fully native. There is no custom inputs for these two sections. This is just exactly what your browser will tell you exists.

Steve: And you have taken care to give some warnings when times really-

William: Yes. If your end time is before, and this will be announced to screen readers, but if your end time is before your start time, you will be warned. You also will be warned if your end time exceeds midnight, so it spans into the next day, because then the date of the end time won’t be the same. And that has some quirks when it comes to how Sorin works between days or dates, but that is handled. Can’t remember the exact algorithm. Had a bit of help from our friendly Claude on that one. But there is handling for how that processes cross-day times.

Steve: Cool. What we did mention before that we have some taxonomies to help you filter your meetings down the way that you like and, the meeting…

You can see those here on the right-hand side, meeting groups and meeting types, and you can select the ones that apply to this post.

William: Yeah. And these are standard taxonomy fields, so you can-

Steve: Add more.

William: … You can use these as you want. You click the add button, then it presents you with the standard input box to create them right here on the fly.

Steve: Yeah

Yep, there you go.

William: There is one other thing I do want to call out. So if you scroll all the way to the very top of this, when you try and update this page, you will actually be given this notice about the documents that are in draft mode before it does publish, it does save, but you get this warning when the page reloads to let you know.

Steve: Yeah, very good. Just another way that we’re trying to help you along the way and give you all the context that you need to properly publish these meetings.

[00:52:17] The Blocks

Steve: So we’ve spent a lot of time on the meeting itself.

Let’s jump over and look at the blocks. So we did talk a bit about the blocks and the shortcodes in the first livestream on BoardScribe Free, which we will link into in the post show notes for this. But let’s look at it a little bit more now, ’cause we’ve made some enhancements and some changes, and of course, there’s a lot of new fields to facilitate here, so I’m in on the board meeting page now, and the meeting minute or the BoardScribe block has been added to the page and, of course, it’s outputting the information that I want it to output.

If I click on it in the right-hand sidebar, under the block settings, you can see all the settings that are available. William, you wanna walk through some of these, the new, display settings?

William: Yep. So at the very first setting is the display type, and by default it’s gonna be table. But if you were to click into that, you will also see list and timeline view.

I don’t see it on the stream either, so I guess that’s overlay problem.

Steve: You don’t see… Oh, you don’t see what’s popping up. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

William: So,tthree options. There’s the list and timeline as the non-default, and then there’s the standard table, which is the default.

Steve: Yeah. I’m gonna zoom in to just make things a little larger for everybody.

William: And you can change these on the fly as needed. Each related setting will update. So as Steve changed to the timeline view, and the show meetings setting afterwards automatically checked because timeline view by default shows all meetings.

And you cannot turn that off for this view. But you can choose it for list or the standard table view. Then there’s records per page, which again, for the timeline disappears. You get all your records. So Steve has just set the records per page to one, and you will see there’s pagination added after the table now. So if you were to click on numbered pagination one to last page, next, previous, and that all works live right here zin the editor.

What field is next? So we have year filters. You can pick a specific year, whatever year you want, and this is our previous solution to someone who, when they tried to build a timeline, couldn’t. So we introduced the year filter so you can pick individual years, and that will filter the list down to just showing those years. And that’s comma separated, so if you want several years, you can put them in. Start and end times, or start and end dates, sorry. So you can optionally pick a start date, and it will show meetings prior to that start date. Optionally again, you can pick an end date, and it won’t show…

It will show in the middle of those two ranges or, both of these are optional, so if you only want to set an end date or only want to set a start date, that also works just fine.

Then there’s a bit of a nerdy field here for the held date format, which is a PHP date time format. You’re probably never gonna need to change that, but just in case you will, it exists there and, we’ve got that-

Steve: Like if I wanted to remove the day.

William: Yes. Okay. And if you know what these are, awesome. If you don’t-

Steve: Yeah.

William: There’s a link telling you to go and find out what those letters reference.

Steve: Okay.

William: And there’s a similar field for the not held format, which I guess in this case is just month and year.

Steve: Month and year, yep.

William: And then a time format, which is a similar string and these are the nerdy fields. You’re probably not gonna need to change these, but they’re here just in case.

The next option is the first visual option, so force all columns to equal width. They’re all gonna be equal width in this display because of, by nature of having space so many that they’ll fit on the page. But let’s say you just had the title and the location listed. The location field would likely be much larger than the title. And if you had scrolled to a different table, they would be different sizes. So you can use the force all columns to the same width option so that they will be equal sized, and that just ensures consistency across, multiple tables if you have it on the page.

And it’s also just a nicer reader experience as well when things are nicely, equally spaced.

Date scope. I can’t see what’s in that to –

Steve: Yeah, so it’s- …

William: All those terms.

Steve: So default to all meetings, and then we have upcoming and past. So if I go to upcoming meetingsm these are ones that are scheduled in the future, which I don’t believe I have any.

William: You do not, it seems.

Steve: And if I do past, it would be all the meetings in the past. So you could essentially, put a block on the homepage that shows upcoming meetings, right?

William: Yes. Or just set it to be just one per page as well, so you can say next meeting.

Steve: Yep.

William: Yeah. Then we have sort order, which is, ascending or descending, so it’s newest first or oldest first. And then next one is meeting groups. Now, as I can’t remember if this is an autocomplete field. I believe it is. But this is,

Steve: So this would be a slug, or?

William: This would be a slug of a meeting group.

Steve: Yeah, so if I go to groups.

William: Yeah. iI is autocomplete, so if you start typing in the name.

Steve: I’ll just type board. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. There it is. Board of trustees.

William: And then you pick it, and this is just a taxonomy filter.

Steve: So, these are only meetings that pertain to that group.

William: Yes. And similar for the type field below this, which is the other taxonomy.

Steve: Yeah. Which types are… Oops, I’ve gone too far. Types. What are some of our types? Oh, like retreat. Yeah, so if I did retreat. Yeah, so they just start showing when you start typing.

William: Yeah. And these effectively consider these as filters, so what displays in the table will only match all of the filters that you have picked.

Steve: Yep.

William: And I think that is all of the general display settings. We do have a next section for custom labels. So you can change the name of any of the table headers to whatever might match your needs. So if you don’t want it to say agenda, you want it to say something else, you can change it.

But all of the columns are customizable as needed, in that, title, date, agenda, minutes, location, livestream, recording, closed caption transcripts, and documents. So all of the columns are available to be modified-

Steve: Yep.

William: For the headers. There’s a links group just after this, which allows you to customize what the view agenda or view minutes links would say, and then those are just two text fields that you can type in whatever you want.

And then there is also setting that allows you to open them in a new window, by default.

Steve: Yeah. So I changed that into like view notes.

William: Yeah, and there it shows on the table in the agenda field, or what would by default be the agenda field, but you could change this to notes-

Steve: Yeah

William: if you want.

Steve: So you’re… So even if you use the agendas and meetings fields, you could actually use those for whatever you want to use them.

William: Yes. And, that’s something that makes what you do for your meetings, every meeting is different.

Steve: Yeah, fully customizable.

William: Yep.

Steve: And then opens in a new window.

William: Yep, so that will just make the links for agendas and minutes open in a new window.

Steve: Should I test that?

William: Yeah, target as blank. Yeah. Yeah, might as well test.

Oh, it doesn’t have put the icon.

Steve: Yeah, so we need to add a icon. Yeah.

William: Okay. I’ll take a note on that.

Next settings groups is hide. So you can hide the data from any of the fields you choose, which effectively hides the field itself.

Steve: Yeah, so a lot of times title is not a super helpful… This is like a title for the back end, and that’s why we made it when you create a meeting that you don’t have to actually define the title. If you just hit save, it’ll generate a title for you in this kind of format. And, so a lot of times title’s not super important to output in this regard.

William: Yep. So you can turn off any of the columns as needed.

Steve: Yeah. So if I wanted to turn that off and say I don’t have minutes, or I don’t wanna show the location. If I get rid of location, the table will collapse down quite a bit.

William: Yep, so you have full customizability about whatever tables you will have output or not.

And by default, all of the pro columns will not be visible at first. You need to come in and turn these on, and that’s just to make sure that whatever tables you have on the front end when you install the pro plugin doesn’t visually change.

Steve: Yeah, we don’t wanna modify… If you’re already using free, when you go to upgrade, we don’t wanna modify your front-end output without your consent.

William: Yep.

Steve: So, I think that’s it on the fields, right?

William: Search results. So, in my local, I still have the show columns field.

Glad you pointed to share. I must have last week’s build.

Steve: Yeah. So cool. Did we miss anything? We ran through the block at the end. Now I do wanna reiterate that we did create a shortcode for this for anybody not using the block editor, because a lot of sites still use the classic editor, and we did provide the shortcode for that with all the similar settings.

William: Yep. All the exact same settings should be available in the builder.

Steve: And you can build, you can go here just like you would in the block editor and set all your settings. And, if I only wanted to show 2025, you can see here, and I hit copy, and now I’ve got the shortcode, and I get a preview. So, what we’re trying to do in this instance is we’re trying to give those using the classic editor the same, ease as somebody using a block, just bringing that experience to both areas.

You just do it in a different place. You can go here and, change… if I want a timeline, you can see that the shortcode updates with the template for the timeline. Copy that, throw it on the page, and you’ve got the same thing you would if you were using a block.

William: Yep. And you also do get the preview.

It’s a live preview right there in this page. Yep. So you can see what would be contained in these shortcodes as you change things around.

Steve: Yep. So just because you’re using the classic editor doesn’t mean you get less of an experience here.

We are giving-

William: Yeah, or you might be using a builder.

Yeah. So I’ve actually pasted these into Elementor on one of the client websites.

Steve: Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah, so this helps us support, which we talked about in our last livestream last month and was about giving more support to Elementor and Divi and other page builders to make sure that Accessibility Checker works more seamlessly with page builders.

‘Cause what we’re finding is a lot of our customers actually are using page builders. So we wanna give you tools to help facilitate that workflow as well.

[01:05:24] Import

Steve: And like we said earlier, the import, is the same as it was. Now, if you watched the last livestream, the free plugin actually did not contain the importer, and through a little bit of our own discussion back and forth internally, and I think maybe a little, support may have come in, we decided that the importer should be in both plugins.

We added the importer to the free plugin with all the free fields, and now it’s just extended in the Pro plugin to include all of the fields for the Pro plugin as well.

William: Yep, and there is a feature about this I don’t think we mentioned last time, but there’s this big chunk of text here saying that you can import a file again.

So actually if you export… one of our clients I know exports their entire list of meetings, every day or every week and uploads it. This actually handles just uploading the same file. It won’t overwrite existing meetings. So if you have a running meetings document somewhere, you can actually just re-import this over and over again.

It’ll keep existing meetings if they match, and will add new ones as they come in.

Yeah, probably not a feature most people will need, but-

Steve: Yeah.

William: It’s a nice little addition.

[01:06:43] Wrapping Up

Steve: All right. That’s a lot. we ran through a lot today. Hope it wasn’t too much. But, we are excited about BoardScribe Pro.

We have been working extremely hard on it over the last few months, and we’re super excited to get this out to you. It will be available on our website, shortly.

We are going to get Amber on this documentation, and we are gonna get this plugin out to you ready to purchase and ready to put up on your website.

We’re running short on time, so I don’t wanna go too much longer, but just wanna thank everybody for being here. If you’re not familiar with us, we are the makers of the Accessibility Checker plugin, which is a free plugin that you can download from EqualizeDigital.com/Accessibility-Checker.

We have other plugins that we would like you to go check out, such as ArchiveWP, and we have a slew of add-ons for our premium Accessibility Checker plugin, that we would like you to take a look at and help,identify and maintain the accessibility on your website.

And now we are adding BoardScribe to our family of products, all in line with our goal to make the web more accessible.

So look for the Pro plugin to come out very soon. And I’m gonna run. I’m gonna go create a card for Amber to work on documentation, an, William’s gonna fix a few little bugs, and we’ll have this thing out to you shortly.

William: Sure. Yep. Thanks everyone for hanging around.

Steve: All righty. Take care. We’ll see you on, the Changelog livestream next month.