derek's blog

Hi All. 

With V1.0.1 release coming up soon, Raoul and I were thinking of possibly bundling a few additional themes with the openlp.org distribution.  I'm sure there are many of you out there who have designed some pretty awesome themes. Well, how about sharing them with everyone?

The only limitation, will be that they have to use free fonts and free images. Please submit your fonts with your exported theme files if necessary to either derekscotney[at]openlp.org or raoulsnyman[at]openlp.org.

Hi All. 

Due to the fact that neither Raoul or myself have Windows ME installed, we are looking to all you eager volunteers who do have Windows ME to give us a hand.  We have a reported bug where openlp.org V1.0 doesn't install the packaged themes properly on Windows ME, and then on exiting throws some nasty errors.

Hi All

We are fast approaching the planned release of openlp.org v1.0 at the end of this month, and we would like to put together a group of about 10 testers to put the software through it's paces to help us iron out any last issues. We would like to have a test release available by the middle of next week, and then run quick update cycles when issues are found and corrected.

Nothing sums up Christmas like the following song:

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King.
Let every heart prepare Him room
And Heaven and nature sing.

I pray that you and your families would all have a very blessed and Christ filled Christmas. May we never forget the reason why Christ was born to us, and His gift of Grace.

Yours in Christ,

Derek.

Hi All. Release Candidate 5 has now been released. Due to the nature of some of the issues/problems raised in RC4, we felt that we should add an additional RC version before going to a full V1.0. This was mainly due to a lot of rewriting of code to sort out some of the 'little quirks'.

The main issues corrected were:
- A theme import/export problem (involving the delete option)
- In the Bible verse 'Verse' layout mode, verses are not split across slides
- A Bible verse bug seen in imported Bibles was fixed
- A bug in the deleting of songs was fixed
- Auto Open Last OOS feature was fixed
- Missing last slide character bug was fixed

Hi All

Well, I hope that for at least some of you RC3 brought with it some new useful features. There seemed to be quite a few people wanting a Bible Verse enhancement and that was one of the main changes in RC3 that was released this past weekend.

Coming in RC4 will be the last of the additional features we decided were "have to have's" for a full version 1. These include a migration of the theme data out of the songs database and into the theme directory in XML format. Also, the ability to both import and export themes. If we can twist Raoul's arm a bit, maybe we can add a "theme's" section to the website where you can submit your theme creations for other to download and use.

Due to an unforseen glitch with a fault correction, Powerpoint is not functioning in the RC2 release.  We are aware of the problem and it has been corrected.  Unfortunately, we cannot provide a correction release immediately, as there is an  incomplete feature enhancement in the software.  Once this enhancement is completed, we will provide the correction in RC3.  You can expect that hopefully towards the end of the month.  Sorry for the inconvenience if you use Powerpoint.

God bless, 

Derek.

Well, as you have probably already read in one of Raoul's recent blog's, we are planning a big launch for the V1.0 release of OpenLP.org.  With that in mind, we have decided to add a few of the smaller but more useful features from the feature request list.  This comes with the price of a slightly delayed V1.0, and possibly a few more Release Candidate versions.  Our feeling though was that there really were some area's that needed enhancing prior to a major distribution release. You can look forward to the following enhancements coming in the next few release candidates:

- Enhanced Bible Verse handing where you can display multiple verses on one slide
- Some keyboard navigation (actually I think it's in RC2 already)
- Enhanced slide auto-scrolling
- Import/Export of themes
- Storage of theme data exclusively in the 'theme' directory in XML format

Hi All

No doubt most of you are as keen as we are to get openlp.org into a full version 1 status. Well, we are nearly there. Sorry about the few hiccups in the last few releases, they were due to last minute corrections and optimisations in the software and slipped though due to the fact that we were trying to honour our release date promises.

With this in mind we would like to make the RC2 release on the 15th/16th of June and we appeal to all of you out there to give the software a thorough testing in the next week or so, so that RC2 can be our last release candidate. I should mention at this stage that there is a rather unpleasant bug in rc1 regarding the loading of saved Orders-Of-Service. This has been corrected and will be in RC2, so please don't highlight this problem in your feedback. To work around this, you need to rebuild the OOS each time before you use it. Frustrating I know. Sorry!

Things are looking promising for a release of beta 5 in the next week or two. I think I've nailed down the video bug and re-worked the theming to take everyone's preferences into account. You can now set your preferred theme level to song level, OOS level or global default. I few other small bugs have also been resolved. The internationalisation feature will be moved out to beta6.

The one outstanding issue that we wanted to include for beta 5 is the correction of the CCLI bug. This is where we have a small problem that I hope someone out there can help me with. The South African CCLI website does not have the same functionality as the USA website and we can't use it to test the CCLI interface. With this in mind, I would like to ask if anyone out there can assist me with a username/password. I will of course keep it confidential. You can contact me at derek(at)openlp.org.