Previously, we’ve used a third-party plugin called Ultimate Member to handle all of our user account related pages, like Login, Logout, Password Reset, Register, and Account. We are beginning to build our own solution to replace Ultimate Member with better functionality. This begins with new shortcodes for register, password, login forms, as well as custom routes for /account, /auth, /login, /logout, /password pages. Now you won’t have to manage a page in the backend for each of these. They will automatically work across our sites.
Latest Changes
3.1.17October 19, 2023
3.1.16October 17, 2023
In this update, we adapted our livestream features to use the .widescreen class that we had previously created. This will allow us more flexibility in the future to be able to accommodate other stream aspect ratios in the future. We also adjusted the order of the tabs in the livestream tabs section to place Giving ahead of the Bible embed. We made some minor updates to the starter layouts for Group archives as well.
3.1.15October 16, 2023
In this release, we have added a field to our Groups functionality to include a group video. To use this, you’ll need to have your frontend layout updated for groups, so reach out to us for help with that. We also added some new utility classes for videos, which you can read more about in our guide on Video Wrappers. Lastly, we updated some of the styles for our No team members found. shortcode. See this guide for more information.
3.1.14October 12, 2023
This is a quick release to update the icons in the admin section. We use Font Awesome icons as our main icon collection.
v3.1.13October 11, 2023
Due to some changes in the YouTube API, we had to re-work a few things in our sermon autopublishing feature. (That’s right, you can automatically publish sermons from videos on your YouTube channel… neat, eh?) Anyhow, automatically importing the latest video as a sermon is now fixed, so be sure to take a look at your sermons and see the magic! Also, you might want to make sure we didn’t miss any over the last few weeks while things were a little buggy.
v3.1.12October 2, 2023
Recently, we had a few clients who have noticed some issues with their events calendar. Upon further investigation, we found out that it was due to some compatibility issues with the caching system we have on our server. We just pushed out an update to the server that will ensure that the cache is bypassed on all event pages.
P.S. If you’d like to know how to disable the cache on specific pages (and also get a sneak peek at our new user guide) you can see the guide here:
https://digitalchurch.guide/forms/disable-cache-on-payment-forms
v3.1.11September 20, 2023
When adding a new person, we only supported fields for First and Last names. It seemed like that was a good place to start, but we really needed to be able to add prefix and suffix for certain clients. (now paging The Reverend Doctor…) So we did it. Now you can add prefix or suffix to your people. We’ve also updated the new team_members shortcode so that it lists people with those pre/suffixes as well. And we’ve updated the person themer layout in our templates.
If you have a site that was spun up before today, feel free to jump into chat and we’ll be happy to update your person themer layout as well. (The person themer layout is just a fancy way to say the bio page.) You can also download the import file below if you’d like to try to do it on your own.
That’s it for now!
v3.1.10September 12, 2023
You know those times you get an email that somebody filled out a form on your website, but you aren’t really sure what the form was for? It would probably help for you to have a direct link to the form right in the email notification, right? Well, today that small-but-mighty improvement in form notifications is a reality!
Yep. That’s it for now. 😅
v3.1.9September 8, 2023
In this update, we added some new styles to the team_members shortcode that we rolled out last week. In some cases, clients had their heading tags set for larger sizes than needed, so this helps us to make sure the text sizes are more manageable.
We also added some options to enable/disable tabs in the live-tabs shortcode. You can now paste in a bible.com url to define where the Bible embed starts. This allows you to select whatever translation you want to use, or you can even have the embed start on a specific chapter or verse. Those settings can all be found in the livestream settings in your dashboard. There was also a minor scrolling issue in the Bible embed that we fixed.
v3.1.8September 1, 2023
In this release, we re-wrote our livestream tabs shortcode. The previous shortcode was using a framework called bootstrap that helped us create the functionality for the tabs, but with bootstrap came too much extra code that we didn’t need. In some cases, that bootstrap code was conflicting with other code in our system. Some users were seeing issues with smaller text sizes on their live page. So we’ve dumped bootstrap and rolled our own solution using code that is much less prone to conflict. It also makes the livestream page much faster to load.
You can use the new live-tabs shortcode anywhere on your site, but it’s really meant to act as a sidebar next to your livestream on your dedicated livestream page. It features five sections that we’ll explain below.
🗒️ Notes
The notes section pulls the content out of your latest sermon. So if you’d like to allow your people to follow along with notes during your service, you’ll just pre-publish the sermon notes as post content. After the service, you can go back in to add the video. If you are auto-publishing your sermons from YouTube, you may need to go in and combine those posts later in the week.
💬 Chat
The chat feature works with a third-party chat service. We’ve used Arena.im with some of our clients. (Psst: we’re working on building a native chat feature in the future.)
📕 Bible
The Bible tab embeds a basic bible from YouVersion at bible.com. We’re working on a way to make it so you can set your own preferred translation.
❤️ Give
This simply displays your giving action, which could appear as a give button or as a form if you use our native form builder for online giving.
🗓️ Events
This events tab lists the latest events. You must have The Events Calendar Pro active to use this, and we’re currently working on squishing some bugs with that, so you may see a shortcode error in the meantime. If you do, just let us know and we can manually override that error for you on your site.