Posted by The holiday season is still in full bloom and also here at ChurchTools the one or the other enjoys the sunshine. We took advantage of the quiet days and cleaned up a bit for this release with some nice results. But first I would like to introduce two small changes in ChurchTools:
Persons grouped by campus
ChurchTools supports the idea of multisite churches, i.e. churches that have several locations (often called campuses). People must always be assigned to one campus. For persons with many permissions it could become confusing. Because even if a campus was selected, you could still see all persons of all campuses you were allowed to see at once.
We have now made a small UX change. From now on persons of other campuses than the currently selected one will be noticeably separated from the persons of this campus.
We retain the ability to continue seeing and interacting with all people, but it is immediately apparent who belongs to the current campus.
Song categories per campus
In short: song categories can now be linked to a campus.
Why is that of interest? Churches with several locations may have to submit one CCLI report per location. So you have to know which location sang which songs and how often. Before, this was difficult to map. Now locations can maintain their own categories and make thereby clear: the song “Hallelujah” was sung in Bristol Campus City Center 10 times.
Performance improvement
New features are always fun. Especially when it gets fancy, we are all happy about it. But with a software as big as ChurchTools it is also essential that we clean up backstage and revise old code or keep our systems up to date.
That’s exactly what we’ve done in the meantime, and even though I can’t show you a new feature, hopefully you’ll feel a boost in speed.
Scheduled tasks are faster
The cron job does many different things. Among others, it also checks whether a service reminder should be sent to a person. This feature has existed in ChurchTools for a long time, but in large churches this point could often lead to long runtimes.
We have now revised the logic and completely rewritten the code, which has improved this process by a factor of 9. This change may not be noticeable in the first place, since the cron job usually runs automatically in the background, but for very large churches it is a good improvement and our servers are happy as well.
Server Update
Not only did we revise old code, we also updated our infrastructure. This is necessary in many respects. This is the only way we can keep security and performance high. The latter in particular is reflected in our measurements.
Thanks to the updates, we were also able to record a noticeable and measurable performance gain here. This change has been active for some time and is not related to version 3.50.
Whether it’s a new feature or working in the background, it’s important to us that you always benefit from it in the end!
Further changes
if you still want to know further changes, you can find everything in our Changelog.
We hope you like the new version as much as we do. As always, you can leave praise and criticism in our forum.