Latest Changes

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.

v3.1.7August 31, 2023

For a while now, we’ve had to use some workarounds to display people who are members of teams. These workarounds included assigning people to the teams and then going in and assigning the matching team to the person as a taxonomy. We’ll admit, it was pretty clumsy. The more we dreamt about what our teams feature should look like, that has evolved over time to work better than it did at the outset. Now, you can define roles for each team, and then you can add people into those roles. You can also re-order the roles right in the team editor.

So what was a complicated system is pretty simple now. Just make sure your team members are added as people. Then you can edit the team and add them as members to specific roles.

With our new approach comes a new shortcode you can use. You can add the No team members found. shortcode to your team page (or even better, to the team member theme layout) and it will now display the members of that team in the order you used when you created the roles. You can also use the shortcode with a team_id argument on other pages around your site.

Some other preparations

In addition to this new shortcode, we’re starting to set the stage for a new product we call Messenger. It will begin as a simple email platform for you to email your users and people in your database. Later on, we’ll add text communication and in-site/in-app chat widget functionality. That’s all coming down the road.

We also added some code that we’re working on to enhance the dashboard experience. Just a quick preloader so you can feel like you’re heading somewhere important while the dashboard loads.

v3.1.6August 30, 2023

In this hot fix, we had to address a few issues with plugin conflicts between our metadata framework (Meta Box) and our page builder (Beaver Builder). This update added better breakpoint settings in the Page Builder, the ability to add custom CSS/JS to specific modules, and better handling for row background videos using Vimeo.