What's new in BFS-SMS

New schools used to spend weeks typing every existing student into the system before they could go live. Now a school can post a single link in their parents' WhatsApp group and parents fill in their own children's details on their phones - at their own pace, on a clean mobile-friendly form with the school's own branding (logo, name, address, contact details) on top. The school admin reviews each submission and clicks one button to approve. For parents without smartphones, the school can download a printable form with the same fields and the online URL on top, hand it out at the school gate, and transcribe back through the same online flow. The same link mechanism exists for new staff joining the school - they fill their own profile, the admin approves and assigns the role. Big win for new schools onboarding from paper records, and for any school adding a new intake without burdening their office staff with data-entry.

Above the usual numbers and charts, every dashboard now starts with role-aware sentences that interpret what the numbers mean and surface what needs attention - written like a colleague summarising the morning, not like a chart label. School owners get strategic headlines (net margin, retention, capacity utilisation, teacher-to-student ratio) via a new Operational / Strategic toggle. Admins get the day's pulse (attendance %, today's collections, staff coverage, pending tasks). Teachers see their own day. Accountants see money flow. Parents see their child's status. Receptionists see front-desk activity. Students, librarians, store keepers, and exam officers each get sentences tailored to what they actually care about. Sentences are tone-coded - green for on-target, amber for mild attention, red for urgent - and self-suppress when there's nothing notable to say, so the strip never reads as filler.

When parents and staff have BFS-SMS installed on their phone or computer, they now receive real-time push notifications even when the app isn't open - alongside the existing SMS and email channels. Trigger coverage spans the highest-value events: a new message from a teacher, a child marked absent, fee payment receipt, homework assigned, online exam available, live class about to start, fee due reminders, exam results when published, salary processed, leave approved, and high-severity smart alerts. The bell icon at the top of the topbar lets each user opt in once with a single tap, and they can revoke any time from the device's notification settings. Each user can also see and manage their subscribed devices from a new "Push devices" tab on their profile - useful when someone changes phone or wants to stop notifications on a specific browser.

Each school can now control their own push triggers from a Settings page - turn each trigger on or off for the branch, override the title and body to match the school's voice (with system defaults shown beneath each input as guidance), choose which audience receives it, and customise where the notification opens when tapped. Empty fields fall back to the system defaults so admins can override only what they want to change.

The BFS-SMS public site has been rebuilt around what school owners actually care about — the daily admin chaos and how to end it. Direct, no-nonsense copy. Real numbers showing how many schools and students are already on the platform. A scrolling logo strip of schools using BFS-SMS today. Cleaner feature cards. A clear free-trial offer with no card required. Faster to load, friendlier to phones, and respectful of users who prefer reduced motion.

Every visible piece of the public landing page — every headline, badge, button, stat label, CTA — is now editable from Saas → Website Settings without touching code. The stats strip can pull from live database counts or use values you enter manually (handy when your real numbers are too small to be impressive yet). Each major section can also be hidden independently if it doesn't fit your message.

When prospective schools submit the demo-request form on the BFS-SMS landing page, their details are now captured into a proper Leads database — not just an email. Super admins can review every request from a new "Leads" section, filter by pipeline stage (New, Contacted, Demo Done, Trial Active, Paid, Dropped, etc.), search, change a lead's status, and add notes — all backed by a timestamped activity timeline per lead. Submitters automatically get a confirmation email and the operator gets an instant notification. Bots are silently filtered out before they reach the database.

The demo-request form's country dropdown now lists 25 African countries (Nigeria default), and the state / region dropdown adapts to whichever country the visitor picks — Nigeria's 36 states + FCT, Ghana's regions, Kenya's counties, Tanzania's regions, and so on. Countries we don't have curated state data for fall back to a free-text option so visitors are never blocked.

Five new layers of bot / abuse protection on top of the existing form: per-IP hourly rate limit, email + school duplicate detection, reCAPTCHA support (gated by your General Settings captcha toggle), server-side validation that the submitted country is on your allow-list, and required country / state fields. A new "Lead Form & Anti-Spam" panel in Website Settings lets you tick which countries you want to receive leads from, set how many submissions a single IP can make per hour, and tune the duplicate-detection window.

Each of the four hero preview screenshots is now clickable — opens in a clean full-screen view at near-original size so prospects can actually read the dashboard, attendance view, smart alerts panel, and report cards. Arrow keys walk between them. A small magnifier icon hints at the click target on hover.

The hero shows four tabs (Dashboard, Attendance, Smart Alerts, Report Cards) that swap the on-screen mockup. You can now upload a distinct screenshot for each tab from Saas → Website Settings. Tabs without their own image quietly fall back to the main Dashboard photo, so the change is non-breaking even if you only have one screenshot ready.

Submitting the landing-page contact form used to dump visitors on a JSON page. The form now stays in place, clears its inputs on success, shows a clear confirmation banner, displays validation errors next to each offending field, and gives a friendly fallback message with your contact email if the network drops mid-send.

When parents and students install BFS-SMS to their home screen, the icon label, the splash background, and the icon artwork itself all pick up the school's own name, brand colour, and logo — not a generic platform label. A small "Powered by BFS-SMS" credit appears inside the installed app only. Already installed before this update? Just remove it and reinstall to pick up the new identity.

Super admins can now switch the public changelog on or off as a master, then independently choose where the "What's new" link surfaces — the SaaS landing footer, every school's public website footer, the login page, or the in-app footer.

A public-facing page (the one you're reading right now) that lists every shipped feature, improvement, and fix as it lands. Existing schools get a confidence-boosting reference to share, and prospects see the pace of development at a glance.

Parents and students can now install BFS-SMS on Android, iPhone, and iPad home screens. The app launches with your school's name, logo, and brand colour, opens straight to the dashboard, and works offline for pages already viewed.

A clear "Install the App" card appears on the login screen, with platform-specific guidance for users on every browser.

The portal now uses our modern indigo and slate palette regardless of admin theme, with mobile-first spacing, larger tap targets, and a per-user dark/light toggle in the topbar.

A new advanced search page covers school news, events, gallery albums, and pages, with type, date-range, and keyword filters. A magnifier icon appears on every public page.

A dedicated browse-by-year and browse-by-month view for school news, linked from the news listing, news detail sidebar, and site header.

Event pages now show a sticky info card with a live countdown ("Happening today" / "N days to go"), a dedicated share row for Facebook, X, WhatsApp and LinkedIn, and a refreshed "Upcoming Events" sidebar.

Every photo and video in an album now has its own shareable URL — paste the link to anyone and it opens that exact item.

A premium rewrite of the public-facing school site with refined typography, a brand-accented design system, dark mode (with persistent toggle), and a responsive navigation that scales with your menu length. About, FAQ, Teachers, News, Events, Gallery, Contact, Online Admission, Exam Results, Admit Card and Certificates pages all redesigned.

A new opt-in staff visibility page with a 4-card featured grid on the homepage and a designation-grouped listing on the full team page.

The admission confirmation page now prints cleanly to a single A4 sheet without a separate template.

Removed an unrelated marketing button that was distracting parents and students arriving at the school login. Each corner now holds one clear control: the theme toggle on the left and a "Back to your school" link on the right.

Long menus now chunk into 6-item sub-columns and the footer container widens so Contact and Hours columns stop wrapping awkwardly.

Designation titles sized properly with breathing room and accent underlines between groups.

Same fix as the email password earlier today, applied to all 8 SMS gateway credential forms under School Settings -> SMS Configuration. Nine secret fields across Twilio (auth token), Clickatell (password + API key), MSG91 (auth key), Bulk SMS (password), Text Local (API key), SMScountry (password), Bulksmsbd (API key), and Multitexter (Bearer token) all used to be rendered back into the form HTML on every page load - several even as visible text fields so admins could see the live key at a glance. Now every secret field is masked with a placeholder showing whether one is on file ("******** saved - leave blank to keep"); admins editing other settings (sender IDs, usernames) can leave the secret blank to preserve the existing one. Public-facing fields like sender IDs, sender numbers, and usernames intentionally stay visible.

The SMTP / App Password field on School Settings -> Email Settings used to render its stored value back into the page HTML. That meant anyone who opened the browser's "view source" or developer tools while viewing the page could read the live password in plain text - even though the field itself displayed dots. The field now shows an empty input with a hint indicating whether a password is on file, and admins can leave it blank when editing other SMTP settings (host, port, encryption) to keep the existing password. The password value is never sent to the browser again.

A handful of permission rows on Settings -> Roles & Permissions were displaying with strange symbols where a dash should have been (e.g. "Student Statement OoCo Export PDF"). The symbols were the result of a character-encoding accident in an earlier database setup. The names have now been repaired in place and a follow-up safeguard prevents the same accident from recurring in future installs.

A regression in the contact form was silently rejecting every submission before it reached the email handler — visitors saw a "couldn't send" error and we never received their note. The form now correctly carries the security token, and visitors get a clear, honest message when an email truly fails to deliver (rather than a misleading "thanks" banner).

Installation prompts now appear reliably on Chrome again after a brief regression. Install card now only shows when the browser actually supports one-tap install.

Smart-alert trigger rows in SMS Settings now correctly expand to reveal the message-body editor, with clearer "sends to admin staff" recipient guidance.

After approval, applicants are now correctly returned to the school they applied to — no more falling back to a generic landing page.

The WhatsApp chat widget no longer opens and immediately closes on the new public site skin.

A proactive alert system that surfaces students and classes most likely to need attention — chronic absence, missing exam marks, behavioural-report gaps. Alerts appear on the dashboard, in a notification bell on the topbar, and can be sent out via SMS or email.

A single template now reshapes itself for A4, A5, or 80mm thermal printers. Honours your selected-rows filter. No more switching templates per printer.

A combined to-do and upcoming-events panel with inline checkbox toggle, per-event colour, 12-hour AM/PM time, and full dark-mode support.

Slate, Aurora, and BFS Modern skins added to the theme picker; sidebar and topbar refreshed across the platform.

A seven-section, insight-rich layout — Hero KPIs, Finance, Academics, Reception, Staff & HR, Operations and Inventory — each gated by both your modules and your role so users only see what is relevant to them.

Hostel, Transport, Fees, Office Accounting, Reception, and Lesson Plan each get a dedicated insights landing page as the first item in their sidebar menu.

Class assignments now allow up to three teachers per class+section. Duplicate-teacher detection still prevents adding the same teacher twice.

Chronic absence, missing marks, and behavioural-report alerts now name the exact class and section affected so admins can act faster.

Expiry messages now pluralise correctly ("1 day" vs "2 days") and have been reworded for clarity.

Performance pass on hot tables and lazy-loading of secondary sections — dashboards measurably quicker on large schools.

Dashboard parent, staff, and student count tiles now exclude deactivated users so the numbers match the rest of the system.

Branches with NGN currency now default to the familiar 12,300,000.50 format. Currency dropdown labels also corrected.

Form, button, and panel contrast restored in dark mode. Sidebar gradient deepened. Page-header titles read solidly without gradient bleed.

Clicking a day in month view (especially weeks with events on them) now reliably opens the day, even on dashboards with personal to-dos enabled.

Table rows in dark mode no longer wash out to white on hover.

Style and script edits now reach users on first load instead of being held back by stale browser caches.

Page-header icon and title now sit on one compact row on mobile in both light and dark mode. Long titles ellipse cleanly instead of wrapping.

Retakes now correctly score the latest attempt instead of summing all attempts, and questions with rich content render properly instead of going blank.

Pass/fail now uses the overall percentage and minimum passing percentage consistently, replacing an older grade-lookup that produced occasional mismatches.