Latest Changes

This release included some small tweaks to the iframe code that embeds videos. This should fix some display issues we’ve seen on sermon pages. While we were there, we added a field to stories to be able to select a custom aspect ratio to power vertical videos and other aspect ratios better.

In this update, we made a few small tweaks to the stories feature, including updating our front-end layouts to work with vertical video aspect ratios. We added an option to select the correct aspect ratio for videos in stories and also made it s the name is no longer a required field. Some css was also added to help .videoWrapper iframe to work properly on existing sermon videos.

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.

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.

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 [team_members] shortcode. See this guide for more information.

This is a quick release to update the icons in the admin section. We use Font Awesome icons as our main icon collection.

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.

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

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!

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. 😅