Forum

Firstly, I need to say a big thank you to everyone who is using SermonBrowser and helping others to use it. I have been overwhelmed (literally!) by its popularity.

Second, I need to apologise for my lack of input on these forums, and lack of response to one or two personal messages. I wish I could have replied more promptly.

Third, I need to explain the current state of SermonBrowser development. The short answer is that it's on hold, but definitely not abandoned. The long answer is…

I'm not a web developer: I'm a pastor, postgrad student, IT Officer at a Christian non-profit, part-time lecturer, and husband. Like all of us, I have to be careful how I spend my time, and for several months other things have had to take priority over SermonBrowser.

Having said that, I remain fully committed to SermonBrowser. I'm using it personally on a weekly basis on two sites that I'm responsible for, and have nearly 700 sermons committed to it. I'm not about to let it die.

The lack of recent responses on this forum are due partly to the fact that I can't offer personal tech support for SermonBrowser and continue to develop it. It's one or the other, I'm afraid.

The lack of recent updates is largely due to a major mistake that I made. I tried to add two major new features to the next version of SermonBrowser at the same time. Big mistake! When one became much more complex than I imagined, I couldn't extract the bits that did work. I've got no choice but to keep going until I can get both features working.

On top of this, there's the question of Wordpress 3.0 which is due in March. There are some fairly significant structural changes (Wordpress is merging with WordpressMU) that could put some stress on plugins, and I need to make sure SermonBrowser works with 3.0 – for my sake as well as yours!

All this means that there's likely to be any updates to SermonBrowser before Wordpress 3.0 is released. As an absolute minimum there'll be an update which ensures 3.0 compatibility. But I'm reasonably confident I'll also be able to make those other changes I've been working on for the last months.

Finally, I'm very happy to receive offers of help in developing SermonBrowser. If you are a coder, and want to help, please get in touch. My desire is to see SermonBrowser continue to grow in usefulness, and the more involvement from others with better skills and more time, the better that will be for us all.