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The next version of SermonBrowser is now available for testing. I don't usually release beta updates, but there are some fairly major changes in this version, which it would be good to test before release. Don't use this beta version on your main site – it could break things, and may even corrupt your data.

The new features are:
New feature: Allow comments on sermons (requires WordPress 2.9+). Go to options to turn it on.
New feature: Allow pretty permalinks for each sermon (also requires WP 2.9+). Available when you treat each sermon as a post or page (see options).
Enhancement: Much more flexible templating system, which will allow you to:

• Don't display series data for certain series (no more "Part of the None series"!)
• Print filenames next to download icons
• Don't print surrounding text if the template tag returns a blank (no more empty brackets around missing verses)
• Specify alternate URLs for podcast icons
• Resize preacher images
• More Bibles: NASB and Amplified Bible, plus dozens more non-English bibles.

Bug fix: Added missing "Series and Services" menu in frontend admin bar (Wordpress 3.1+).

Download: sermon-browser-0.46-beta.zip

If you have any issues, please post them in this thread rather than cluttering up the rest of the forum. Thanks. You'll need to read the readme.txt to find out how to use the template tags.

If you want to see the new beta version in action, I am using it on my own church website.

Not necessarily. Most of the old template tags work as they did before. The ones that have changed, the upgrade process will try and 'upgrade' to new tags. For example, the tag [esvtext] gets converted to [bibletext version="esv"].

So whilst the new version should make it easier to do certain things, it shouldn't break (or even adversely change) anything that already exists.

By the way, I'm particularly interested in knowing about hacks that people have had to make to core plugin files because the template tags don't give them what they want. If you've any examples, I'll see if I can build that functionality into the new tags.

Thanks for this:
(1) Can you tell me what was in your template before, and what it got changed to?
(2) I've fixed that bug. Thanks.
(3) I'm using custom post types rather than mod_rewrite. This allows the commenting, which would not be possible otherwise. I may well add pretty permalinks for preacher/series, but one problem is that because you can have multiple filter criteria — ?series=30&service=5&preacher=136&date=2009-01-01&enddate=2009-12-31 — it can get pretty complex. I'm not yet convinced that permalinks for what are in essence searches are a good idea – though I'm continuing to experiment with this.

Tim_CNBC said:

Mark Barnes said:
1. I had:

snipped

which was replaced with, the default code (see image in my post above, that was a screeny after the template reset).

Did you do manually reset the template to default, because that shouldn't be necessary. If so, you would have lost changes.

If you didn't manually reset the template, can you give me your code again, but via pastebin.com so it isn't messed up by the forum.