Reflections and Projections

100 Facebook Fans!

OpenLP has hit another milestone with 100 Facebook fans! This is yet another sign of OpenLP's growing popularity. 2009 has been a great year for OpenLP. Version 1 has seen updates and is better than ever and version 2 is coming along nicely with many of the frequently requested new features and an overall improved look and feel. As more and more churches move to using media to enhance their worship experiences it only stands to reason that the popularity of OpenLP will continue to increase. What will 2010 bring to OpenLP world? A release of 2.0? 200 fans on Facebook? 500? perhaps even 1,000 Facebook fans? Whatever happens it is great to see that OpenLP is gaining in popularity and also helping Christians all over the world worship Him more effectively.

If you're not already a fan, why don't you head over to our Facebook Page and become a fan! Don't forget to follow OpenLP on Twitter, and add the RSS feed to your aggregator! We also have a group on Facebook, and a group on LinkedIn.

Version 1.2.3 is available

V1.2.3 is mainly a bug fix release, with 1 or 2 small enhancements.

  • A correction for a theme edit bug where the horizontal and vertical alignment sometimes went haywire

  • A correction for an error when loading a image file for a theme background which contains international characters

  • A correction was made to the "Add Song Wizard" which fixed a bug where songs were not being saved.

  • Improved handling of Bible imports to avoid importing a bible with the same name as an existing bible.

  • When displaying verses in the Live window, the slide list now auto-scrolls up to show the next slide in the same way as the lyrics slides.

  • A change made to the SongSelect web import. The mechanism for importing songs now monitors the lyrics export to file function in the webpage. The reason for the change is because the lyrics are now embedded as a PNG file and not as raw text.

I had hoped to release this for Christmas, but hey, at least it's still THIS YEAR ... only just though ;-)

Derek.

A baby boy...

At last, after five hours of labour, the new mother was resting with her newborn son gently nursing while her husband was taking care of the last few things after the birth. It hadn't been an easy day and she was glad that it was over.

After a number of days' travel, they had reached their destination, the so-called "City of David." However, even after the journey was over, they struggled to find accommodation. Eventually, an old innkepper, seeing a heavily pregnant woman, had pity on them and offered them the only place he had left open, his stables. And it wasn't over yet, just as they settled down, Mary's labour started. Now everything was over, and they could finally rest.

Joseph put the last of the cloths in the bucket of washing water, and walked over to his wife. Despite the hour and the preceding labour, her face was glowing, and she was happy. He looked down at the boy in his wife's arms, and thought back to the miracle of how the Lord had made his wife pregnant, despite her being a virgin.

While this boy was not technically his, Joseph already regarded the baby as his own. One day, this little Jesus would save the world, but until then, he needed a father here on earth.

And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

Luke 2:6-7 ESV

To all our brothers and sisters in Christ, we wish you a blessed Christmas.

The OpenLP Team.

Transitions and Verse Tagging

In the last few weeks a number of requested features have been added to the 2.x code base.

  • Transitions where a song slide will fade into the next slide automatically. This option still needs to be made configurable as it is expected some people will not wish to use it or find it distracting.

  • Verse tagging where each slide is given a tag  eg Verse, Chorus, Bridge , Intro.

  • Verses will also be given a number as there can be many of them in a song!

It will then be possible to simply change the order of the verses, if required. One advantage of this is that each slide is only stored once but can be used may times.

For example a verse list could look like:

V1 V2 C V3 C B V4 C V1

A Verse (V1) can be one or many slides, all tagged the same and treated as a block.

Quietly Hacking Away

Hmmmm... things have been quiet around here. I see the last blog post was exactly a month ago... Don't worry, we haven't stopped working on OpenLP!

In fact, we've been hard at work on things like video and transitions (the two most-requested features). So, to allay your fears, here's a screenshot of the latest revision of OpenLP.

V1.2.2 is available for download

Hi All

This is a fairly minor update release, but I guess more minor to some the others :)

Changes in openlp.org 1.2.2.

  • Correction for bug prevent song information display from being deactivated

  • Added option to ignore saving the unsaved OOS content when selecting to open a new OOS

  • Fixed bug preventing the theme export to use any folder outside of the "Documents and Settings" folder.  Themes can now be exported to any folder.

Derek.

openlp 2.0 testing

The developers of openlp have really been burning it up here lately. There are some really neat things happening. The testing, however has been a little slow (mainly due to me dragging my feet) so we are needing a little help on the testing front. As most of you that are testers of 2.0 know, the developers  want to use full regression testing for version 2.0. Full regression testing pretty much means no stone goes unturned, and every possible scenario is played out in testing before the release. To accomplish this we need to write test scripts for everyone to follow so we know that things have been checked out completely on a variety of hardware, operating system environments, etc.

If you are interested in helping write some of the scripts we are breaking them down per plugin. For example the songs plugin will have a set of test as will the themes plugin, etc. This is fairly involved process but really helps you get to know the software well and is a way for those of us who can't or don't have the time to help with the coding to make a contribution. You can check out what we have so far here. The basics are making sure everything that should be there is there and making sure that everything that is there works. If you are interested in helping out let me know so we won't have two people working on the same thing or join us over in irc at #openlp.org.

Wesley

State of the Application: OpenLP 2.0 revision 600

Hi Folks,

I just thought I'd give you all a quick run-down of the current state of OpenLP 2.0.

We've been working hard on version 2.0, which is written in Python, using Qt4 as it's GUI, and the PyQt4 binding to facilitate this. Yesterday evening we reached another minor milestone when we committed revision 600 to trunk!

Some of the implemented features include:

  • Cross platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD

  • Plugin architecture with ability to switch plugins on and off on the fly

  • Song plugin, with verse ordering for songs

  • Bibles plugin with web and OSIS (Sword Project) import capabilities

  • Media plugin for dealing with audio and video

  • Custom Slides plugin for custom text items that are not songs (like liturgy)

  • Image plugin, with multiple images aggregated into a single item in the Service Manager (great for slideshows!)

  • Presentations plugin which integrates with PowerPoint, PowerPoint Viewer and OpenOffice.org Impress1

  • Audit plugin to track song usage

  • Remote plugin, for remote control (great for remote nursery alerts!)

  • Nursery alerts

  • Customisable slide themes

  • A separate Bible theme can be selected

1. No support for Keynote yet, as none of the developers has a Mac. If you have a Mac and fancy yourself a developer, *please* contact us!

Some of the features we will be implementing:

  • CCLI SongSelect integration (coming soon!)

  • Dual Bible translations per slide

  • Much better internationalisation support

We are still a long way off from a stable release, but it's really encouraging to see how far we've gotten, and I'm really proud of the team for all the work they've done so far!

If you're interested in just chatting with the guys, come join us in #openlp.org on Freenode.

If you're interested in helping out, join us in IRC, and have a look at our development wiki: http://wiki.openlp.org/

Help Market openlp.org

The openlp.org team has decided to up the ante on our marketing, but we need your help!

We've created a Facebook Page, a group on Facebook, a Twitter account and a group on LinkedIn (see the "Follow Us" section below the menu on the left). We're also working hard to improve the SEO of the site.

There are a few ways you can help us out...

Social Networking

You can help by following us on Twitter, becoming a fan of the Facebook Page, and by joining the Facebook and LinkedIn groups. openlp.org's Twitter page is linked to the blog on the site, so you'll always see the latest news via Twitter, and joining the groups on social networks allows you to network with other users of OpenLP, and with the developers too.

Vote for OpenLP

Both Ohloh.net, a social network for open source applications, and SourceForge.net, an open source project hosting service, offer voting and reviewing facilities. So go and vote for OpenLP on Ohloh.net or SourceForge.net.

Linkage

Furthermore, if you have a blog or a web site, add a link to the openlp.org site with the words "free church presentation software" or "free worship software" on an appropriate page. If you're not so hot on your HTML, we have a sample of each below.

I use some <a href="http://openlp.org/" title="free church presentation software">free church presentation software</a> called OpenLP!

Looking for <a href="http://openlp.org/" title="free worship software">free worship software</a>? We use OpenLP!

Version 1.2.1 is available

V1.2.1 is purely a bug fix release, solving

  • A translation bug in the Portuguese language

  • A problem if a default display was not selected in the First Run Wizard

  • A display numbering issue causing "index out-of-bounds" exceptions

  • A bug with the blank screen notification message being on the wrong display at startup

  • A bug where in certain Windows display configurations, the Verse search button was not visible

Derek.