Sermon Date is no longer available

Hey @elmills81,

Thanks for your feedback, would you mind giving us more information on how this is causing you guys issues and in what use cases?

Thanks,
Igor

Most Sundays we upload the sermon right after the 1st service. However, a few Sundays per year we are either off site or have issue with the recording and need to do followup editing/cleanup. When this happens it doesn’t always get edited and posted on Sunday. Then when we post the sermon it shows for Monday or Tuesday instead of the date that the sermon actually occurred. We really liked the feature where we could back date as needed. Default to the current date is absolutely fine and would actually be preferred, but the option to change as needed for the “preaching date” vs the upload date was something we used.

I’d like to second this conversation. We had this coded in a theme to show on the homepage. The date is important. If it isn’t uploaded on the date it was delivered on then the dates are off as noted above. This broke a custom function we’d written displaying the latest sermon on our homepage. Would love the “Sermon Date” to return. Obviously could simply change the date of posting in WP but would seem to be a good idea to have a specific field for this.

Hi @elmills81,

Thanks for that feedback.

Its true the date by default is the date you publish or save the sermon however that default behavior can be changed at any time. See the quick video i made of the church i go to, you can simple click edit on the publish date and backdate it or literally put any date in there you like. You can even future date it so it goes live by itself.

https://www.useloom.com/share/b3c1b84e65a048a3b768a0fbc569c09a

It would be great to hear whether this is something that would solve that issue for you guys?

@weslinda sorry to hear this has caused issues for you guys. Would you also be able to confirm whether the above satisfies your needs too? If you email your custom function through to [email protected] we would be happy to tweak it for you so it works with the WP post dates.

Thanks,
Igor

Hey Igor. Thanks for the quick reply. I’ll shoot over the document we had in place to pull this information. If tweaks can be made to reproduce, that would be great. I think the client is using the date change themselves when posting so it should be fine. We’ll just need to make them aware if they aren’t already.

This is a viable work around.

I was having the same issue as the OP. The new version had messed up my workflow. I didn’t realize you could edit the actual publication date. It’s a rather odd fix for this problem, but it does work. If I were posting older archived sermons, it would seem strange that it would display as being “posted” in 1956, for example.

I think it’s better to let users add a Sermon Date, and default to the publish date if no Sermon Date is provided.

There are times I want to publish a sermon on Monday afternoon, but the sermon date should be Sunday. I can’t do that the way this currently works. It’s also more intuitive to have a Sermon Date displayed for users who aren’t very tech savvy.

Valid points guys, thanks for your feedback.

We’ll discuss it more here today and give you an update on this.

Thanks,
Igor

Hey all,

Nikola here, the lead developer on the Sermon Manager project.

Let’s go through some reasons why the date field was removed, the pros and cons of it, and why we should or should not add it back.

The reasons for date removal are:
– Bad compatibility with WordPress and themes;
– Constant influx of emails related to bugs related to sermon dates;
– Too much time spent on fixing issues, instead of focusing on improving existing codebase and working on new, v3 version;

Pros of date removal:
– Simpler code (which means that it’s less likely for things to go wrong)
– Better compatibility with 3rd party plugins and themes
– More time for us, developers, to focus on other issues, respond to support requests, improve products, etc

Cons of date removal:
– Some user cases cannot be done anymore (the ones that caused this forum topic to be created)
– Couple new issues showed up, for some ancient Sermon Manager views (they have to be modified manually, by hand)

Why we should get the date functionality back:
– Allow people to schedule sermons in, separate to preached dates

Why we should not get date functionality back:
– Fixing issues will take too much precious time for developers

We acknowledge our users do want it back, so I will personally try to find the best way to include it, with the same functionality, but with better code that it is powering it (so we, and you, have less issues). ??

Thank you all for replies, the constructive conversation and for using Sermon Manager!

I too noticed that the date was gone. I made the adjustment of simply editing the publication date (we don’t always get sermons posted as quickly as we’d like…). For us, that was sufficient as they still display in the sidebar the same way (no custom coding in place here). I did search and search to be sure I hadn’t missed it as it seemed like that used to pop up an error if a date wasn’t included (but I may be thinking of another plugin). I could see it being a value if you’re doing archival-type sermons as mentioned above (sermons from 1956 would be cool to have available!).

For me, it’s a non-issue (unless such archival tapes show up sometime).

Thanks for the great plugin!

Ah, I wish I’d seen this thread a week ago! ??

I was actually in favour of removing the Sermon Date field and just using the built-in Publish date. That was simpler for me, and worked much better with my theme (Genesis) without me needing to create additional functions to get my theme to display the correct date on my site.

I see that with today’s update to Sermon Manager 2.6, the Sermon Date field has unfortunately been added back.

My question now is how this will affect the sermons I’ve added over the past couple of months, since this field was removed. Those sermons obviously had no Sermon Date field added to them. But now that the Sermon Date field is being used again, what date will those sermons display?

And what will happen if I continue to leave the Sermon Date field blank and only use the built-in Publish Date field? Will that work? Or is it necessary for me to use the Sermon Date field in any case?

@nikolam or @wpforchurch can you give me some advice?

Hey @germankiwi,

Thank you for your patience, we somehow missed this reply notification.

That’s a great concern, and we somehow missed that scenario during testing. But, no need to worry, just 20 mins ago, I’ve created a fix that will make Sermon Date completely optional.

[…] without me needing to create additional functions to get my theme to display the correct date on my site

We’ll investigate the theme code to see how to adapt sermon dates to work for your theme as well. We already have some compatibility code in place, but, it’s not perfect. ??

But now that the Sermon Date field is being used again, what date will those sermons display?

They will display published date, there’s no need to modify anything.

And what will happen if I continue to leave the Sermon Date field blank and only use the built-in Publish Date field? Will that work?

It will work. ??
The fix will allow both dates to be treated the same. (in terms of sermon display and ordering)

Thank you for your comments. ??