So much of what WorshipPlanning.com has become is the result of feedback from churches like yours. This evening, we applied four enhancements that have been among the top recent requests.
Easily See Who Isn’t Available
Many folks have told us they would like to see who is unavailable to serve on the People Scheduling page before they click and drag them to a role. Tonight’s updates addresses that by listing team members unavailable to serve for a particular service right on the team panel. Check out the picture to the right. You may need to use the Display Options on the scheduling page to get the empty teams to show up initially.
Applying Worship Flow Templates
More than ever, we have had questions from Planners on how to apply a worship flow template to an existing service. Technically, that feature has existed for quite a while. But we decided to make it more obvious to access AND more advanced in how it works.
First, to apply a template to an existing service, hover over the ‘actions’ menu on the worship flow page and select ‘apply a worship template’. Next, you’ll notice a new and improved Apply Templates page that lets you actually choose to either replace existing worship flow elements, or append the template elements to the end of the existing worship flow. It will even give you a preview of what your new worship flow will look like!
And for those curious as to how this was done before the Actions menu option, there was (and still is) an icon on the page where worship flow templates are managed (Admin >> Worship Flow Templates). The small icon looks like a 2 stacked sheets of paper, and it is next to each template name.
Printing and Exporting Song Lists
We’ve added a few buttons to the Songs Library page. Lists of songs can now be printed or exported to a MS Word, Excel, or CSV (comma separated values) files. Just get your list of songs looking as you’d like to export it by selecting showing and hiding desired columns, and click the appropriate Print or File Export button (above the Selected Songs box). And, by the way, the Print option will actually create a PDF document for you to print, since it is much cleaner than printing from a normal browser window.
Listen Button in Songs Menu
If you have associated one or more MP3s with a song, you can now listen to the them by simply clicking the “listen” button right in the song’s menu. Just click on the song title (anywhere in your account), and click the little blue icon.
What’s next in the update cycle?
We have got a few more very exciting song-related updates that are about to enter the testing phase. One of them is something we have unofficially called the song “back-fill” project. This feature will give you the option to have WP look through the songs in your church’s library, and fill in any missing data that we have in our top-songs library (author, copyright date, record label, YouTube music link, Amazon MP3 link).
We are also working on a performance improvement project that should speed things up for pages with songs listed on them. AND we have a very, VERY cool feature that we really want to tell you about….but can’t just yet. Stay tuned!
PDF Setlist Builder
Chances are we all do something (perhaps even a little odd) to prepare our voices for singing. Drink a tall, neat glass of water? Delight in a bag of greasy potato chips? Well, we are hoping you’ll post a comment with your trick to tuning those pipes before taking the stage. And in return for sharing your closely guarded secret, we’ll randomly select two people to win an “Essential Vocals Warm-Up CD” from The Musicademy.
