and then click on the Confirm-box's OK button.
If you clicked on the icon by mistake or the
count of selected activities is not what you expected, click on the Cancel button
instead.
Activity is the PRESTO term for something you want people to do. On the Make Signup Schedule page, you combine an activity with a date and/or time period. This creates a schedule item that people can sign up for. Conceptually, activities are created before schedule items. This is because a schedule can contain the same activity at multiple times (e.g. there are multiple performances that someone can usher at). However as a convenience, you can create a regular activity as part of creating its first schedule item.
These are on-site time-of-day commitments, such as a task you want volunteers for or a seminar people can signup to attend. You can choose from the following types:
A person cannot signup for two primary schedule items whose time periods overlap. If you want to allow a person to signup for two overlapping tasks, you must make either or both of them Background tasks. Additionally if you want a person to be able to signup for a background schedule item more than once, append (2 thru 9) to the task's base name. For example, append (2) if you want to allow a person to signup for it twice.
Planning activities are for any task not associated with an on-site time-of-day commitment. You can choose from the following types:
These sections often use service provider terminology, but the features apply to all the scenarios.
These activity types are used when you want to give users the ability to book slices of time within a schedule item's overall time period. A sliceable activity is an on-site activity that operates like a provider's appointment book. A service is a named use of a provider for some period of time. For example, a hair stylist offers services like "Trim (30 min)", "Perm (1 hr)", and so on. Thus booking a service/time is a little more involved than doing a regular signup.
Sliceable activities and services are of use when the duration of schedule items is up to the user. In particular:
Also note that sliceable activities result in very compact schedules (e.g. 1 schedule item per tennis court per day, rather than 1 per court per schedulable time).
You create sliceable schedule items the same way you create regular on-site schedule items. However the time period you set when you create such a schedule item is the provider's entire shift, rather than the time period of a single service/appointment.
You are also responsible for inserting break periods (like lunchtime) into sliceable items. For more on break periods, click here.
A sliceable schedule item's signup form contains a Service to Book menu. The services you create establish what can be in each such menu. (Usually all services are there, but you can use the Project property to restrict what services a provider offers).
The Create Sliceable Activity form has a Create calendar schedule checkbox. If checked, clicking the form's Create button will also create a public calendar view that shows this activity's upcoming months — and is named the same as this activity. Thus this feature makes it easy for a user to book with her "regular provider".
This is purely a convenience feature. After this schedule view is created, edits to it do not affect the provider, and vice versa. So if you (or a user) want the view to look different (e.g. show past months), you can do so. However deleting a sliceable activity does also delete its schedule view if any.
You can edit an activity by clicking on its Copy, Update, or Delete icon. To apply an editing action to multiple activities at once, select the desired activities first:
Click on a and then click on the Confirm-box's OK button.
If you clicked on the icon by mistake or the
count of selected activities is not what you expected, click on the Cancel button
instead.
Click on a 
, fill in the fields you want to change, and
then click on the box's Update button.
Each selected activity is modified:
fields you entered a value for are changed, and other fields are left unchanged.
Unless Keep Selection is checked, the selection is cleared and the Update box is closed
after all the activities have been processed.
Click on a 
, fill in the new name info, and
then click on the box's Copy button. A "Save As" is done for each selected activity,
If Keep Selection is checked, each original activity is deselected
and each new one selected.
If Keep Selection is not checked, all activities are deselected and the Copy box is closed.
A common reason to check Keep Selection is to add multiple locations to a group of activities. For example, suppose a pair of classes at some location were heavily oversubscribed. You could select these 2 activities (say Class1, Loc1 and Class2, Loc1), enter a new location, click the Copy button, enter a 2nd new location, and again click the Copy button. Both classes would now have two additional locations.
Activity properties control how schedule items behave. For the most part, they apply to all types of activities, but there are some differences for sliceable activities and services.
Activity properties also influence how schedule items are displayed.
An activity's name is how it is referred to in signup schedules. Thus you want a phrase that will tell someone exactly what she is signing up for. For example, Cashier may be a precise-enough name at one event; but in another event you might need more specific names: say 1st Floor Cashier and Basement Cashier.
If you leave an activity's Location field blank, its whole name is its Base Name field. If you do not, its name is Base Name, Location. Locations are of use when you want to systematically make a general name more specific. For example, you might want to use performance names as locations when naming Theatre Usher activities — giving you activity names like Usher, Oklahoma; Usher, Hair; and so on.
On a Create, you can enter a comma-separated list of locations in the Location field. This will create multiple activities at once. This is purely a UI convenience feature. Each created activity is completely separate, just as if you had done several Create's, each identifying one location.
In the List schedule layout, a schedule item's when-it-is column has an intro phrase.
To override the default phrase, fill in the activity's Intro field. For example, if you preferred Needed by date for some planning position, you would enter "Needed by" in its Intro field. For an on-site task, if you specify both an Intro Phrase and an End Time, 00's and AM/PM's are omitted from times to make up for the added space required.
To assign an activity to a project, enter the desired term in the Project field. Giving different kinds of activities the same project name enables you to deal with them collectively. Conversely a project's team is all the people who signed up for any of those activities.
Locations are used to partition a single kind of activity into multiple more specific activities. Imagine an art show for both adults and children where you wanted to define separate activities for judging the kids and judging the adults. One way to do this would be to:
Projects are used to group together different kinds of activities. For example, if you had a Write Brochure activity, a Contact Local Businesses activity, a Do Town-Wide Mailing activity, and a Publicity Chair activity, you might want to give them all the same project name, say Publicity.
Defining locations and projects before you create your schedule items can improve the ease-of-use of your website:
The default for self-signups is Allowed. This means the activity will always be shown on the event's self-signup page. If you want the activity to only be shown on privileged signup pages, set Self-Signups to Not Allowed. (Of course, if you do not Publish an event, all of its activities are implicitly Not Allowed). If you want a self-signup to be possible only if a person has a role matching the activity's name, set Self-Signups to Matches Role. This is called a conditional activity and works as described here.
The default signup style is Immediate. When a person (or you on behalf of someone) does this kind of signup, the person is fully signed up as soon as OK is clicked in the signup form.
If you need for a signup to include an approval/disapproval step, set Style to Request or Category Request. When this kind of signup is done, clicking OK in the signup form only creates a pending signup. The person is not fully signed up until an administrator approves the request using the admin-signup page.
You use the Category Request signup style when you want people to request a job category and then have an admin assign them to a specific job in that category. For more on Category Requests, click here.
If this activity requires some unique form, set Signup Form to that form. If signups for this activity are associated with the "usual info", set the dropdown menu to Event's Default Form. To associate the activity with the factory-installed empty form, set the dropdown menu to Just Person's Name. (This form contains only the person's name for an admin-signup and no input fields for a self-signup — since it is the logged-in person being signed up).
Note: you use the Make Signup Form page to create signup forms.
Fill in the Description field when there is info people might want to know about when they signup for this activity. Also if you start a Description field with !emphasis phrase!, the Emphasis Phrase is displayed both at the start of the description AND next to the activity name on signup pages.
You may create a "fancy" description by using HTML. You can author it right in the description box, or you can create it in an app. To put an app-created description into the description box, either cut and paste it or install it on the web and insert a link to it.
When an activity has a description, its name on Self-Signup Home, non-admin signup pages, and Manager Activities will be a link. If so, it is this color and a click on it will display the description. Additionally when an email message lists signups, the activity names therein link to their descriptions as well.
On Make Signup Schedule and admin signup pages, clicking on an activity name displays its Update Activity form. On these pages, activity names are this color, and may be preceded by a dash or question mark. The former says the activity is admin-only, and the latter says it is a conditional activity.
This section describes the properties that are unique to these types of activities, and any differences in how the common properties work:
Note1: if you want to truly allow 45-minute-long bookings, set Starts/Hour to 4 — so that bookings could be made on 15-minute clock boundaries.
Note2: if you increase Starts/Hour after shorter services have been booked, they will tie up more time in the schedule than you might expect.
Note: you may not increase Duration to a new 15-minute boundary while its service has bookings. On the other hand, a decrease in Duration does NOT shrink the length of its service's existing bookings.