So you've been hearing all this noise about OpenLP 2.0 coming out, you've seen screenshots, and you're wondering if this new version will be available in your language. Perhaps you're wanting to contribute, but you're not a "computer person"?

The latest version (723) now has the ability to store Notes against a service item.

Right click one the item title and select "Notes" .

Raoul posted a screenshot of OpenLP 2.0 and OpenOffice Impress a few days ago, and for an open source application, this is a great pairing. In addition I've also been working on getting PowerPoint Viewer support working in Windows...

Over the last few weeks the alerts framework has been extended, adding new requested features.

These features include.

• The ability to change the alert Font size.  The Background will resize to fit.
• The ability to place the alerts at the Top or Bottom of the screen
• The ability to store all alerts issued.
• The ability to add / amend / delete from the alerts history.
• The ability to select and resubmit an existing alert.  This does not re-save it unless the text has been changed.

In version 2 of there is a pluging called "SongUsage" which records all Live songs and when they were used.  This is to help with the production of yearly usage returns.

The Plugin geneates a CSV file which can be procesed using OpenOffice.

This can replace the existing utility which extracts the data from the service files.

As you can see our OpenOffice.org Impress integration seems to be working pretty well. This was just a small test I did this morning to see how well it worked, and I was pleasantly surprised. Well done to gushie for all his hard work on getting this working!

The milestones for OpenLP keep on coming. Today we reached 200 Facebook fans! Excitement is building for the release of version 2.0, and version 1 has been receiving some nice improvements over the last few months. There have also been some comments about users leaving high priced software and coming to OpenLP. With the economic situation today more and more churches are turning to OpenLP because of cost. After turning to OpenLP many are being pleasantly surprised at how well it competes and in many cases performs better than its high priced alternatives.

Well folks, we've reached another milestone with OpenLP 2.0 - revision 700. And not only have we reached a big revision, the Bibles plugin is now better than before!

The importer has been reworked, both interface-wise and code-wise. It features a Wizard style interface, well known in computer interfaces these days, making it faster and easier to use the importer. The code has been changed fairly dramatically now as well, to facilitate a pluggable import system, where developers can easily add new importers with little hacking.

A few days ago, sjpslabbert asked the question in a forum post how many people are using OpenLP? As I said in the reply, it's close to impossible to answer that question. All we know is that we average 100 downloads a day, there were over 16000 downloads of version 1.0.1, this site has over 2500 registered users and we are approaching 200 fans on facebook.

What we don't know is how many of those downloads are new users who go on to use OpenLP regularly.

Yet another bugfix release. This one, however, pulls in a fix for a bug in an external component use to import CSV bibles, and does some fancy footwork around PowerPoint (again).

Here's a complete list of fixes: