What's new on Kiva 2/5: Big improvements to lending teams!

Team message boards update!

For all you awesome lending team members, we've made a number of improvements to the team message boards:

1) Team captains can now post featured messages to communicate important events, goals, initiatives, etc. The featured message will be highlighted as the first post on message boards and will also appear at the beginning of nightly digest emails.

2) We’ve added a panel on the right side to show loans that this team has recently talked about. You can also skip to particular messages to see where the loan was discussed.

3) Any time you include a loan link in a message, you’ll now see a small preview box that shows the borrower’s profile picture, amount raised, and fundraising status. We hope this will be helpful to all of you that join forces to fund loans!




4) And last, but certainly not least, we received a number of requests to increase the amount of time that your team’s “recent activity” covers. It used to be 48 hours, but it’s now 90 days!

If you're not already part of a Kiva lending team, find some like-minded people to lend with now.

PHPUnit upgrade

For those interested in how Kiva’s code base works...

After our PHP Upgrade, we've been able to upgrade some of our related libraries, namely, PHPUnit -- our unit testing framework. Each piece of code we write is divided into small, testable units. We write "unit tests" to ensure these functions still work when one of our 29 engineers makes a change. Over 3,600 unit tests are constantly running to ensure any problem can be found and fixed quickly. So next time you make a loan, think of the hard working engineers :)

Have questions about Kiva site development? Send them our way at blog@kiva.org.