Hey,
You are all right. Sermon Manager does have some bugs. But that’s only because we have made big progress in short amount of time. Some bugs slipped by, and that is our fault.
We can all agree that Sermon Manager development testing process isn’t airtight and last couple bugs made us realize that we need to rewrite it ASAP. That will be done during weekend. We will stress on testing much more in the future.
WP For Church strives to be as transparent as possible and involved with users, so I will explain everything in plain English in this post.
First, let me explain why the issue creeped up:
We made a change how individual sermons are rendered. Until 2.8, sermon content was always empty in the database and we had couple functions that rendered the actual content above/below invisible empty database sermon content. Major drawback of that render type is that allowed 0 customization with visual templating plugins (such as Elementor, Visual Composer, Divi page builder, etc).
So, in 2.8, we have removed “above/below” rendering functions and rendered everything in the database on post save (that’s why it works when you manually update a post). We also added a function that will go through all sermons and save them automatically to the database, but it had a bug. Audio player would not play and quite possibly embed codes would not work. So, we fixed that in 2.8.3 and added another function that would resave all sermons again (with audio player working), but it seems that it did not work.
We tried to fix everything fast, but we actually introduced another bug in 2.8.3.
I’ve been working real hard to patch everything up last night, but seems like I was too tired and didn’t notice the last bug in 2.8.3., it was past 2 am when I was finally done. I am sorry about that. I was also unexpectedly away today so I did not have time to fix it, but will do it tomorrow for sure.
Another pro of rendering sermon content in the database is that WordPress search (with all third party search plugins) will work out of the box.
(By the way, search worked since 2.7., but a bit patchy – it will work much better with newest updates)
If you are curious what has been changed since 2.7:
– Added REST API support (this is huge – it will allow other plugin developers to easily integrate Sermon Manager with their products)
– Added error recovery (which will allow us to fix more bugs faster, but it’s a bit buggy, so we temporarily disabled it until we fix other major issues)
– Added complete support for other languages, Sermon Manager is multilingual now (@GITNE on GitHub helped a lot with this one)
– Added support for Jetpack features
– Added support for PHP 5.5, 5.4 and 5.3 (this will allow churches that can’t upgrade their PHP versions to use Sermon Manager without any issue)
– Added back “Date Preached” and made it to be optional (this one took a lot of time, but we listened to our users and got it back)
– Fixed more than 50 bugs from older versions and some new ones ??
You have maybe heard that we have a public roadmap for Sermon Manager, so we have been working hard to meet deadlines for it as well.
I think that some of you might be pleased to hear that we will soon add code for importing Sermons from other plugins. It will be an easy one click process. ??
So, yeah, a lot has been done, and it’s expected for couple bugs here and there to show up – but, we will make sure that they don’t in future.
TL;DR: We will fix the issue tomorrow.
Thank you all for patience and understanding.
Nikola M.
Lead Developer @ WP For Church