Updates are coming very soon

This is very great pity. For our new web site, having considered most (seems like ‘all’) available plugins for sermons, I found none as capable Sermon Browser. I certainly dismissed Sermon Manager.
The announcement that ‘a developer’ was taking on Sermon Browser was a considerable releif. However, this seems not to be the case. All we have is an inferior plugin devising a means of capturing the Sermon Browser users for their own product.
So, I’m supposed to feel that a downgrade of product is a way ‘forward’… but I don’t.

Hey @davidn78,

Thanks for your honest thoughts. However i would like to (graciously) point out some false assumptions.

WP for Church isn’t treating this as a business opportunity, neither was our purchase of WP for Church last year. We are designers and developers who were finding that we’re constantly having issues with sermon plugins, none of them seemed to just work. So when the opportunity to acquire WP for Church came along we took it, purely to give people like us the product and experience we always wanted.

The same goes with Sermon Browser, it is a matter of ‘serving’ people by providing means of migrating and continuing to use their website missionally, nothing more, nothing less.

Is our user base going to grow as a result, yes, and that’s just reflective of a LOT of effort being poured into Sermon Manager, unlike any other comparable plugin. Sermon Manager is also currently the only one built according to WordPress coding standards, all the other’s are not.

Yes, we don’t have certain Sermon Browser features and we always knew that going into this and that this may cause issues for some users. Hence why we (along with Mark) agreed on certain features that we would be bringing across. This is still in development. You can see everything coming up on our public roadmap https://trello.com/b/xGz75VJD

You can see the amount of effort that has gone into Sermon Manager to date https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/sermon-manager-for-wordpress/#developers, since we acquired it, it has been a giant project to take a neglected plugin with a large user base and improve the whole code base as well as support it. This is evident in our reviews over the past 11 months (since we acquired it), support threads and active installs.

We’re also not happy that Sermon Browser has reached its end, however should we watch from the sidelines and hope its user base ‘figures it out’ or do we try and make sure they can migrate and ensure the number one thing is as unaffected as possible…making sermons available on their websites so that the church can effectively perform its primary function, telling all about the good news of Jesus.

Lastly, and just to give you some context, this whole project is being funded by another business since the Sermon Manager project doesn’t financially support its own development. So whilst in an ideal world we may want things differently, the truth is, this has all been a ‘labour of love’ and not some sneaky business venture. We are looking to build a Sermon Manager Pro plugin which will be a paid plugin in an effort to make the whole project self funded, which i think it should be.

In love,
Igor @ WP for Church

Igor,
Thank you for your thoughtful response. Interesting to see your roadmap on Trello.
I’ll be looking into ways forward for us; the whole site is under review. The sermon plugin is part of a bigger picture, which is getting more extensive by the day.
Your final comment about the project being self-funded resonaes with me, actually. There’s real merit in such sustainability and continuity.
David

Hey David (@davidn78),

Not a problem and i appreciae your understanding and response.

All the best with your website project. If we can help, please reach out anytime.

God bless,
Igor

Hi Igor,
I want to have another look at Sermon Manager import from Sermon Browser. A couple of questions:
How soon might we see import from another site?
Thinking about fallback/recovery: is the import a ‘one-shot deal? IE, is there a sure way to go back to SB should I wish to? (Is this what is provided for in the 2.11.0 release?)

Thanks
David

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by DavidN78.

Hey David (@davidn78),

Thanks for reaching out.

Our small team is currently swamped with Sermon Manager Pro, it’s a project that has been pushed out for the last few months so we want to get the beta version out asap. This means the remote migration for Sermon Browser > Sermon Manager is delayed until after the beta.

As far as your other question, its certainly not a one way deal, you will be able to use or have both plugins at the same time or deactivate SB and go back to it anytime. All our importing process does is convert the SB data in the database into something readable by Sermon Manager.

Hope that answers it all.

Regards,
Igor

David. I backed it out completely by simply restoring the latest database backup that I had made prior to the install.

Jack

Hi, Thank you for all your hard work. However, We’ve yet to migrate the original Sermon Browser plugin on our church website to an alternative and we don’t appear to be experiencing any problems with it at this moment (“if it ain’t broke why fix it?”!). At this stage We’re happy to just stick with the basics. What will happen if we just continue as we are?

@italianna –
Any outdated, un-maintained plugin is a huge security risk.

Jack

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by Jack Rogers.