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I'm proud to announce that OpenLP 2.0 reached revision 1000 on Sunday evening. That means that there are over 1000 features, improvements or bugfixes in OpenLP 2.0.

One of the latest new features that was added to OpenLP is a Song Import Wizard. Those who downloaded and installed Alpha 2 "Hairy Habakkak" would have noticed that there was a Song Import Wizard in there, but it didn't seem to work. This is because it was simply a shell, and had no actual functionality. I'm glad to say that this has been changed, and in Alpha 3 "Dashing Daniel" the Song Import Wizard will work.

Following 2 months of work, the display and text rendering code has been replaced. Due to the magnitude of the change there may still be bugs, so please report them in the usual way.

These changed allow a number of significant new features to become available:

• Text over video now works correctly.
• Changeable image and video backgrounds now have a proper start and finish.
• Text enhancements are now available like colours and styles (bold, italic, etc).
• Spell checker for songs and custom slides.

This is a fairly minor update release with the following changes:

- Prevent the creation of the ".lit" file in the openlp.exe directory which causes Windows 7 issues
- Correction made to the bundled PPT presentation
- Correction made to display configured Bible permission.
- Audio component updated due to bugfixes

I'm very happy to tell everyone who uses PC-BSD and is looking for free church presentation software for PC-BSD that OpenLP is now available for that platform as well. Kris Moore of PC-BSD has kindly packaged OpenLP for us, and you can find the package on pbiDIR.com. Many thanks to Kris for helping get OpenLP onto another platform!

Revision 956 commits code to change the database schema for the way song information is stored.  This is to fix a previous oversight with alternative titles (they work and are stored correctly now) and to add the ability to link media files to songs.

When updating to this or any later revision your old database will crash OpenLP.  To prevent this from happening:

Finally - I found time to write some code!  We can now import OpenSong format songs to the development version of OpenLP2 (as of revision 951)

It will import from straight text files, or from ZIP files containing loads of OpenSong files.  Note that, unfortunately, there's something weird about importing files with non-ascii characters in their filenames from zipfiles which I haven't got to the bottom of yet.  This causes the importer to die horribly with unicode errors.. so that's next on the list to fix!

Anyway, testers - have at it!

As some folks might have noticed, we released OpenLP 1.9.2 "Hairy Habakkak" (aka Alpha 2) about three months after we released our first alpha release. The more adventurous folk might have even noticed that on the developers' wiki, the rest of the releases are all aimed to be about 3 months apart.

While we aren't 100% set to those timelines, we have mostly decided to get a new release out every 3 months, for a few reasons:

This morning we are pleased to announce the release of OpenLP 2.0 Alpha 2!

Please remember to read through the Frequently Asked Questions before using OpenLP - it answers many questions you might have about the new version. The download page will be updated later today.

OpenLP has hit yet another milestone, 350 Facebook Fans. While not scientific, it appears that OpenLP's popularity is ever increasing as the developers continue chugging along with version 2. There are constant improvements being made, feature request being filled, and I think the developers even find time to sleep and have a life on occasion.

Being a rainy public holiday here in the UK, I decided it would be a good time to update you all on v2, since we've now sailed past revision 800 and there have been a number of changes since the last update.

I've been continuing to work on Song Imports and have now added the ability to import Word/Writer and Powerpoint/Impress documents via an interface with OpenOffice.org. The import itself is fairly basic and makes some assumptions on the format of the file, but will hopefully save some typing in many cases. I've also worked on the remote interface and now made it possible to control OpenLP with a web browser. This will require the remote plugin to be enabled and then connecting to http://localhost:4316. It's very basic at the moment, and it doesn't have any inbuilt security so if your church computer is on the internet or public network then you will need to consider the risks.