Posted by The year 2021 starts in much the same way as last year ended. This may be quite stressful for some people. So I find it somehow fitting that the year’s motto for German Churches speaks of mercy: Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Luke 6:36.
For us, the year starts right away and the next version is in the pipeline: Version 3.69. The first version of the year doesn’t bring any big changes, but we’ve worked hard to fix many bugs and minor repairs that might not always be visible at first glance. I’ll show you a few small changes now.
Rota: Identification of external persons
The rota is a great thing. You can see at a glance who is on duty on Sunday and also see the gaps, i.e. unoccupied services. The people who can be assigned usually come from the list of persons in ChurchTools. But it is also possible to enter external persons without a ChurchTools account. This is useful, for example, for guest ministers for whom you may not want to create a separate account. It is sufficient to simply enter the name (text) as the person on duty.
From now on, external persons will be identified as such in the rota with a corresponding user icon, so that no more confusion can arise.
Bulk letters: Delete HTML templates
ChurchTools offers the possibility to create bulk letters. So by means of templates PDFs are created per person (or household) and in them the placeholders are replaced with the personal data. The templates can be customized independently, because these are HTML templates. With a little knowledge of HTML, new templates tailored to the church can be created quickly. With version 3.69 it is (finally) possible to delete old templates as well.
Group registration: Archived persons
We have corrected a bug in the group registration that I would like to mention briefly here. If a person logs in to a group and the person does not exist in ChurchTools, a new person is created in ChurchTools (if set).
This happens now exactly the same, even if the person should already be in the archive. In other words, people in the archive are no longer taken into account during group registration. This is because confusion arose here, so we have adjusted this behavior.
API: Get songs
Here’s another treat for our tech-savvy friends: Version 3.69 brings new REST endpoints. With this you can now retrieve all songs, either a single song or all songs of a certain agenda. Not only do you get the song’s information, but all arrangements are included as well. You can also use filters to limit the result list. You can find more about this in the API documentation.
For more information about the REST API, check out our help section.
Further changes
If this is not enough for you, you will find all changes of this and earlier versions in our Changelog.
We hope you like the new version as much as we do. As always, you may leave praise and criticize in our forum.