Moving to PyQt5 and Releasing Version 2.4

Due to a packaging issue on one of our supported platforms (Debian, to be precise), we have had to radically shift forward the release date of OpenLP 2.4, as well as cut out a whole lot of features we had hoped to include.

The biggest feature of OpenLP 2.4 will be the move to Qt 5.x. Qt is the GUI library we use for OpenLP's interface, and up until now we've been using version 4.8 of Qt. Just like all software projects, Qt has been moving on (they recently released version 5.5), and we've unfortunately been lagging behind.

We had always intended to upgrade to Qt5 in OpenLP 2.4, but thanks to the aforementioned packaging problem, we have to release a version of OpenLP which uses Qt5 by the end of January. With this in mind we decided to cut the release cycle short and just release 2.4 with Qt5 and some bugfixes.

The good news in all of this is that we should be able to make OpenLP's multimedia capabilities more powerful thanks to the reworking of media in Qt5. This should also encourage developers to continue contributing to OpenLP, which means that we all win.

Here's our intended release cycle for OpenLP 2.4:

Date

Version

27 Dec 2015

OpenLP 2.3.1 aka Alpha

10 Jan 2016

OpenLP 2.3.2 aka Beta

31 Jan 2016

OpenLP 2.4

If we feel we need it, we may release a second beta on the 24th of January, but this depends on developer availability, and how many bugs we have found and/or fixed.

We Need You

Again, we need you. We've just uploaded some fresh language files to Transifex for OpenLP 2.4 (you may need to be logged in to view this page), and we need your help to translate them into your languages. We'll blog in about a week again with a status update for these translations. Not many strings have changed, but we'd like to give folks whose translations were not able to be included in OpenLP 2.2 to get their translations up to date and included in OpenLP 2.4.

[ Image Credit: FAST by fhirART ]

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