Home Release Notes What's new in PortalHQ — May …

What's new in PortalHQ — May 2025 to May 2026

By mario· May 27, 2026 · Release Notes

A summary of the major changes deployed across PortalHQ between May 2025 and May 2026. We’ve grouped changes by area so you can find what’s relevant to you. Smaller fixes, refactors and behind-the-scenes infrastructure work aren’t listed.

Highlights

A handful of major changes worth calling out:

  • A complete Newsroom redesign — campaign list, templates grid, stats page and overall theme have all been rebuilt for a cleaner, faster experience.
  • A new file manager — central place for managing files used in pages, newsletters and resources, with protected folders for sensitive content.
  • A Compass SIS integration — alongside the existing TASS, Synergetic, Edumate, Sentral, Edge and Wonde integrations, schools running Compass can now sync students, parents, staff, classes and timetables.
  • EnrolHQ integration for the Fee Calculator — submissions from the calculator can now flow directly into EnrolHQ as leads, one per child.
  • PWA persistent session — staff and parents using the web app stay logged in across browser restarts.
  • External activity registration — for co-curricular activities run by an external provider, point parents at the provider’s site instead of taking PortalHQ signups.
  • Custom fields on events — schools can now add their own data fields to events (budget codes, departmental flags, anything school-specific).
  • Activity waitlist notifications — parents automatically notified when a spot opens for their waitlisted child.
  • Pages module — internal content pages added to the staff sidebar for fast access.

Newsroom and email communications

A big year for Newsroom. Most of the platform was redesigned and several significant features added.

  • Campaign list redesign (Mar 2026) — Faster, easier to scan, with better filters and stats inline.
  • Campaign stats page redesign (Mar 2026) — Clearer view of opens, clicks and bounces with better visualisation.
  • Campaign templates grid (Mar 2026) — Templates now display in a visual grid so it’s easier to pick the right one.
  • Newsroom global theme overhaul (Mar 2026) — Refreshed the look and feel of every Newsroom page.
  • Allowed sender emails (May 2026) — Configure which addresses can send campaigns from your school. Better deliverability and security.
  • Default sender email (May 2026) — Set a default sender for new campaigns to save clicks.
  • Open Graph tags on newsletters (Apr 2026) — Newsletters shared on social media now display correctly with the right title, image and description.
  • Section ordering by order field (Apr 2026) — Newsletter sections now sort consistently by the order you set.
  • Alphabetical dropdown ordering (Apr 2026) — Dropdowns across Newsroom are now sorted alphabetically by default.
  • Parent portal Campaigns page (Apr 2026) — Parents can now browse past campaigns from their dashboard.
  • Mailing list refresh API endpoint (Apr 2026) — External systems can trigger a mailing list rebuild on demand.
  • BeeFree v2 authentication (Aug 2025) — Migrated the email designer to the latest authentication, more reliable and secure.
  • Bio image improvements (Jan 2026) — Bio photos now respect EXIF orientation, are resized on import, and can be bulk-imported from CSV.
  • Higher resolution hero images (Mar 2026) — Newsletter hero images now render at higher resolution on retina displays.
  • Issue templates v2 (Jan 2026) — Newsletter issue templates redesigned for more flexibility and faster setup.
  • Unified template settings per layout (Dec 2025 – Jan 2026) — Layouts now carry their template settings, so applying a layout brings the right configuration with it.
  • Resend edited notices in digest (May 2026) — When a notice is edited, recipients who saw the old version get the corrected version in the next daily digest.
  • Copy campaigns between schools (Jun 2025) — For multi-school operators, campaigns can be replicated across sister schools.
  • Newsroom migrations for multiple schools — Tools used to bring legacy newsletter content into PortalHQ from external systems (Tara, SGS, Pared, Knox, IGS and others). Available to schools migrating from third-party newsletter tools.

Co-Curricular activities

The Co-Curricular module saw significant improvements to signups, the activity dashboard and integrations.

  • Activity signup page redesign (Apr 2026) — Cleaner layout for parents and students browsing available activities.
  • External registration on activity groups (May 2026) — Link an external provider’s URL for activities not run in PortalHQ.
  • Activity waitlist notifications (Apr 2026) — Parents get notified the moment a spot opens for their waitlisted child.
  • Contractor API v2 (May 2026) — New API for external systems managing contractor activity assignments.
  • Staff activities API (Apr 2026) — API endpoint exposing staff’s activity assignments.
  • Restyled student co-curricular signups (May 2026) — Cleaner student-facing signup page with the same information laid out for a better mobile experience.
  • Expanded fixtures dashboard (Mar 2026) — More data on the dashboard at a glance — upcoming sessions, attendance trends, alerts.
  • Signups by student gender (Mar 2026) — Filter the signups list by gender for activities split into boys’ and girls’ streams.
  • Editable co-curricular mobile link label (Mar 2026) — Customise what the activity link is called in the mobile app.
  • Cascade archive student activities (Apr 2026) — Archiving an activity now archives the related student assignments cleanly.
  • House points for OSG (Nov 2025) — House-points system extended for OSG-specific configurations.
  • Engage module for IGS (Sep 2025) — IGS-specific engagement features deployed.
  • Photo sync from GSI for OSG (Sep 2025) — Staff photos now sync into OSG profiles automatically.
  • Saving on activity signup price rounding and term labels (Apr 2026) — Cleaner price display on the signup detail screen.
  • Future absence delete (Mar 2026) — Parents can now delete a planned future absence from their dashboard.
  • Past absence justifications (Mar 2026) — Justify past absences against a more flexible reason list.
  • Future absence end-time validation (Apr 2026) — Stops absences being created with invalid end times.
  • Fixture alert email rendering fix (May 2026) — Alert emails for fixtures now render correctly across all email clients.
  • Activity group Newsroom tag fix (May 2026) — Co-curricular tags now flow into Newsroom correctly for mailing-list automation.

Events and Calendar

Several improvements to event creation, approval workflow and how events display.

  • Custom fields on events (Apr 2026) — Schools can now define their own data fields (budget codes, departments, risk levels, anything else) and they appear on the event form.
  • Filter event requests by upcoming or past (Mar 2026) — Easier to find the requests that need your attention.
  • Daterange picker migration (Apr 2026) — More reliable date-range picker across the events module.
  • Event datetime min-date constraint fix (May 2026) — Stops events being created with start times in the past.
  • All-day event extra occurrence fix (May 2026) — Fixed a case where all-day recurring events generated an extra unwanted occurrence.
  • FullCalendar go-to-date button fix (May 2026) — The date navigator now jumps to the correct date.
  • Missing timepicker fix on event forms (May 2026) — Time pickers now load correctly on all event forms.
  • Event form double timepicker fix (May 2026) — Fixed a duplicate-control issue on the event form.

Fee Calculator

A significant upgrade for prospective family interactions.

  • EnrolHQ integration (Jan 2026) — Fee calculator submissions automatically create leads in EnrolHQ, one per child.
  • Custom fee ordering (Mar 2026) — Override the cost-based sibling sort order with school-specific ordering.
  • Editable from-email (Mar 2026) — Configure the sender email for fee-calculation summary emails per school.
  • Sibling discount display (Mar 2026) — Discounts are now displayed more clearly to parents during calculation.
  • Covenant Fee Calculator improvements (Feb 2026) — Several Covenant-specific enhancements.
  • Campaign email invalid domain fix (May 2026) — Catches invalid email domains submitted via the calculator.

Notices

  • Resend edited notices in digest (May 2026) — Recipients of the daily digest see edited notices re-sent rather than the original stale version.
  • Hide notice metadata for parents (Feb 2026) — Notice author and other metadata hidden from parent-facing notices.

Pages and File Manager

Two new modules added.

  • File Manager (Apr 2026) — A central place to upload, organise and reference files used across PortalHQ — newsletters, pages, resources.
  • File Manager protected folders (Apr 2026) — Folders can be locked down so only specific staff can read or upload.
  • Pages in staff sidebar (May 2026) — Internal Pages module added to the staff sidebar for quick access.
  • Pages tree school scope and admin perf (May 2026) — Pages tree now scopes correctly per school and loads faster.

Parent portal and mobile app

  • PWA persistent session (May 2026) — Web users stay logged in across browser restarts.
  • PWA notification icon URL fix (May 2026) — Push notifications now show the correct icon.
  • Mobile login staff parent redirect fix (May 2026) — Mobile login now redirects correctly for dual-role users (staff who are also parents).
  • Mobile authenticated requests fix (Apr 2026) — Mobile app authentication is more reliable.
  • Mobile timetable API fix (May 2026) — Timetable data flows correctly to the mobile app.
  • Cocurricular calendar for dual-role parent (May 2026) — Parents who are also staff see their child’s co-curricular calendar correctly.
  • Hide My Tasks and Events cards (Feb 2026) — Dashboard tasks/events cards can be hidden for cleaner layouts.
  • Master search for parent portal (Jan 2026) — A single search box across the parent portal that finds anything — events, notices, resources, slips.

Forms and Slips

  • Forms show-for-group filtering fix (Apr 2026) — Forms targeted at specific groups now filter correctly for parents.
  • Medical data requests pagination fix (May 2026) — Long lists of medical data requests now paginate correctly.

Reports

  • Reports API (Jun 2025) — A new API for pulling PortalHQ reports into external systems.
  • Billing report date range filter (Mar 2026) — The billing report now supports custom date-range filtering.
  • Subject change delete view (Mar 2026) — Staff can delete subject-change requests that were created in error.

SMS

  • SMS low-balance notification (Mar 2026) — School admins get a heads-up before SMS credit runs out.

SIS integrations

  • Compass integration (Jan 2026) — Full SIS integration with Compass — students, parents, staff, classes and timetables.
  • Compass staff sync (Mar 2026) — Staff records sync from Compass.
  • Compass contacts sync (Feb 2026) — Parent contacts sync from Compass.
  • Compass staff school email fix (May 2026) — Staff school-email identification fixed.
  • Sentral contact change requests (Mar 2026) — Parent-initiated contact changes flow back to Sentral.
  • Sentral household code length fix (Apr 2026) — Fixed handling of longer household codes in Sentral.
  • Synergetic staff email domain classification fix (May 2026) — Staff email domains now classified correctly during sync.
  • Edumate permission exceptions caught (Apr 2026) — Edumate sync handles permission errors gracefully instead of failing.

Enrolment

  • EnrolHQ integration (Dec 2025) — Lead-capture and enrolment workflow integration.
  • Filter future enrolments (Mar 2026) — Schools can filter staff and student lists to include future enrolments.
  • Allow graduated students as contractors (Apr 2026) — Graduated students can be set up as contractors for ongoing work.

Infrastructure and performance

A few foundational improvements that benefit every user.

  • CloudFront for static and media assets (Apr 2026) — Static files and media now served via CloudFront CDN for faster load times globally.
  • Newsroom Open Graph tags (Apr 2026) — Social previews of newsletter URLs.
  • GitHub Actions speed improvements (Feb 2026) — Faster deployment pipeline = quicker rollouts of new features.
  • Bootstrap 5 migration (Apr 2026) — Underlying UI framework upgraded across the platform. You may notice cleaner visuals on many pages.

A note on migrations

Several school-specific migrations happened over the year for schools moving their newsletter content from other systems into PortalHQ. These were one-time data imports — the destination schools (Tara, SGS, Pared, Knox, IGS, Engage at IGS, House Points OSG, GSI photo sync, PD updates for SAAC) now have all their historical newsletter content available in PortalHQ.

Feedback

We genuinely want to hear what works and what doesn’t. Send feedback, bug reports or feature requests to your usual PortalHQ contact and they’ll route it to the team.

This changelog covers the period from 28 May 2025 to 28 May 2026. Smaller fixes, internal refactors and dependency updates are not listed.