• Fixed Hero padding on the Olivet theme with the 'single image' display option.
• Fixed Olivet theme nav bar wrapping weirdly at some screen sizes (1200-1298px)
• Fixed Anavim page featured images displaying incorrectly
• Footer menu items that are external links now open in a new tab, just like Header menu items
• Resolved issues with images, buttons, and links rendering correctly within resource content blocks.
• Resolved an issue where the Index Nav block would sometimes display "Dummy Nav Title" if no title was set (configurable in Resource Settings). "Explore the Library" is the normal fallback, and should now correctly display when no title is set.
• Featured series block could crash if there were no resources in the series.
• Breadcrumbs would not display correctly on deeply-nested pages
• HTML Embed block could cause a crash if it was completely empty.
• Taxonomies containing only resources scheduled for the future have been fixed to not crash on the Index Nav block and types/authors/years pages.
• Added stricter controls on bots crawling the website while making allowances for "good" bots.
• Fix: PCO Events pulling the internal start time instead of the public start time (Thanks to First Hurst for sending this in)
• Improvement/Fix(?): Link Page Refresh: 
  • Some embeds will not work with the instant-load AJAX router we use to make navigating around the site super fast. We've added an extra piece of functionality to the URL option: if the URL is prepended with a "$" character, it will force a reload when loading the page. 
  • Example: to load page "Embed Page" with slug "embed-page" you would enter "$/embed-page" in the URL field of the navigation settings or custom link.
• Fix: Bugs with hamburger nav menu not hiding when clicking a link or clicking outside of the menu.
• Fix: Paragraph font size being too large in dashboard release widget.

• Events, Resources, and Series have been updated to all allow for Promo Images as well as optional Hero Images (original feature request).
• Promo Images appear on cards and social media previews and are the primary image for the event/resource/series.
• Hero Images appear as backgrounds for a given event/resource/series, such as on the Latest Single Sermon block on the homepage, or as a background image for the document page (e.g. /events/church-picnic).

• You can now select how many events to display on the Upcoming Events & Planning Center Events blocks. For more information, check out this help article that has been updated with more information about how exactly the planning center integration works and this feature request if you're interested in more functionality here.
• Planning Center events have received suspense cards (grayed out boxes that fill space while the real cards are loading (original feature request).

• We've updated studio to give more clarity on how events will be displayed/when they will display and hide. 
• Event start and end dates are now proper dates, with no time component (e.g. 2024-08-15 2:06pm -> 2024-08-15)
• Events will be displayed on the day of the event, or the last day of the event if it spans multiple days. Upcoming events blocks that contain event cards and the /events page will update immediately at midnight to no longer show the event that has ended.
• Single event pages will update themselves within the following day to include a notice stating that they are passed.
• The "time" component for single day events behaves exactly the same; if an event spans multiple days, it will only display the days; if it is a single day event, whatever is filled in for Time will be displayed as well; e.g. "Aug 5-6" or "Aug 5 7pm"

• Homepage blocks (LatestSermonSingle, LatestOfType, LatestSermons, FeaturedSeries, IndexNav): These will now be up to date within 1-2 minutes of the scheduled time.
• Index Pages (authors, scriptures, series, topics, types, years): These will be up to date within 24 hours of the scheduled time. What this applies to: if a new author/scripture/series/topic/type/year is added, it will not display on the index page because it will have no resources attached to it initially. When a resource is first added to that taxonomy and scheduled for sometime in the future, it will still not display, because that resource shouldn't be visible yet. The new revalidation scheme means that within 24 hours of the new resource's publish date all indices will be up to date with the taxonomies it affects.
• Series Archive page: The series archive page (for an individual series, e.g. https://olivet.gospel.io/resources/series/coffee-mug-verses had a lot added to it. The resource cards below will always be up to date within 1-2 minutes, but the header itself (which displays the count of resources) is populated differently and may take up to 24 hours to be fully up to date.
• More From This Series Block: These blocks at the end of resources will be up to date with scheduled resources within 48 hours of the specified time.
  • Why is this time so long? Because this block may be present on a lot of resource library pages, bot indexing traffic could end up causing a lot of data to be re-fetched. This requires more bandwidth and can contribute to hosting costs. 
  • All the numbers described here so far are our best guesses at a good balance between keeping your MereChurch efficient and your content up to date.
• RSS Feeds: These will no longer update with the latest resource immediately when "publish" is clicked; they will instead be up to date within 24 hours of a new resource being published.
• With these changes and policies, our goal is to make it more transparent how scheduling works and a more consistent experience. If you come across something that is not obeying the rules laid out here, please let us know!

• Enhancement: Rebuild pageHeader component styling on all 3 themes
• New: Add Genesis pageHeader styling
• Fix: Image block rendering size
• Fix: Index pages misrendering when there are no items in the index
• Fix: Anavim header width bug
• Fix: Visual bug with column content hyperlinks 
• Fix: Location block not displaying on mobile
• Fix: Hero content markup in video/single picture mode
• Fix: Acacia Header Bug
• Fix: Crash that would occur when using full-width images on secondary pages
• Fix: Images not displaying on PCO Event cards (thanks to Stonebrook Church for reporting this!)
• Usage maintenance: Updated robots.txt to reduce bot traffic to nonexistent pages

• Fix: crash in preview mode on the homepage
• Fix: child topics pages prevented from being properly rendered
• Fix: errors with event background images
• Fix: missing author images
• Fix: 404 breadcrumbs that would direct you to /resource instead of /resources
• Fix: Podcast RSS feeds that would cause an error in rare cases due to bugged resource import
  • Thanks to Crestview Hutch for sending this in!
• Fix: crash when previewing featured resources block
• Fix: Resource cards that would linked to a 404 page instead of series archive for series taxonomy
• Fix: draft resource types appeared in the IndexNav in rare cases
• Fix: Acacia slideshow & hero bugs
• Fix: OpenGraph canonical URL for resources 
• Fix: Staff Embed block not respecting alphabetized name when using display by category 
  • Thanks to Stonebrook!
• Fix: major visual issues with Olivet page header 
  • Thanks to Grace HC!

• New and improved preview system! 
  • Major overhaul of the existing preview system to reduce errors & crashes and improve preview editing experience
  • Draft changes update in real time to be visible anywhere on the site. "Real time" means within 10 seconds of the change being made in studio.
  • All homepage blocks respect preview:
    • These blocks did not previously load draft content, but now do: Latest Sermon (Single), Latest of Type, Featured Events, Child Page Links, Location Worship Block, Staff Embed, Latest Sermons, Featured Resources, Featured Series (new) and the Index Nav block.
    • You will see suspense (gray box outlines in the shape of the block) while the latest data is fetched. After this initial load, the updates will apply in real time like everything else.
  • Previewing entirely new documents:
    • In the past, previewing entirely new resources/pages/events caused issues and wasn't well accounted for. This has been fixed; new documents will preview with what they can.
    • If there's no draft matching the document you've requested to preview, you will see a "draft 404" page. Adding a slug and making sure your slug in the browser and slug in the studio line up will resolve this.
  • Areas of the site without preview:
    •  There are a few areas of the site still without preview. These are:
      • Index pages (e.g. /resources, /resources/authors/andrew-royce, etc.)
        • An exception is a series index page, like /series/coffee-mug-verses. The new series index page has added more to these pages so we took the time to implement preview here as well. 
        • Note: the resource grid still does not load preview data, but the series metadata does (description, hero image, etc.)
      • Event grids (e.g. /events)
      • More From This Series (new feature on individual resource pages)
      • Fallback Images for single pages
        • Events: e.g. /events/picnic-in-the-park would not show a draft fallback image, but the Featured Events block would
        • Single pages: e.g. /about-us will not show a draft fallback image, but Child Pages would
    • These areas do not have preview for one reason or another: some are that we don't see a huge use case for it (e.g. previewing the resource card) others are that it was going to be too much time for this release. We wanted to get the 90% preview solution (vast improvement over the previous) in place so it could be used.
    • If you'd really like one of the above items to load preview data, please let us know! We're not done with preview, and intend to keep improving it in the future. Check out this feature request for better card previews!
• Error Reporting:
  • As a platform, Merechurch is young and we're actively improving it all the time. A part of that growing process is errors -- things on the site not working quite right, or crashing outright. With this release, we now have better error handling:
  • If the site encounters an error, it serves a "Sorry, something went wrong" page. Users can try again or submit an error report to help us debug it. Additionally, hitting this page sends us an error report automatically, so even if you don't submit anything we can investigate and fix the issue.
• New podcasting RSS feeds that are publishable directly on your favorite podcast platform! (original feature request)
  • RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is the industry standard for podcasts. We've made it easy to set up a podcast feed for any resource type in the studio. Currently, only resource types are supported for this kind of "extended RSS" feed. If you'd like to publish a podcast around some other taxonomy, let us know with a feature request!
  • You will need to set up accounts with the podcast platforms you'd like to use to publish resources. The three we primarily support are Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify. RSS is used by nearly everyone, though, so if there's another platform you're likely able to publish to it as well.
  • The RSS feed published by your Merechurch conforms to the iTunes (Apple Podcasts) standards for podcasts, which are also followed by most other podcast platforms. Once your podcasts are published, you can fill out the links for Apple Podcasts/Google Play/Spotify in studio so the index page (e.g. https://olivet.gospel.io/resources/sermons) also links out to the podcast on these platforms.
• Improved RSS: More feeds available for more sections of your resource library
  • /resources/feed -- for all resources published on the site
  • /resources/authors/andrew-royce/feed -- for all resources authored by Andrew Royce
• New “Featured Series” block to show off your latest sermon series automatically on your homepage (original feature request)
  • It's now easy to prominently display a series on your homepage or a secondary page. This block supports a title and two modes:
    • Use the latest series (by start date)
    • Select a specific series to feature here
• New “More from this Series” section shows you related sermons on a single sermon page
  • This component displays a simple list of other sermons in the same series as the one currently being viewed.
  • Two related feature requests we've love your input on:
    • Additional "End of Resource" components
    • More from this Series Enhancements
• Improved Series Index page (/resources/series) with series dates spans and resource counts
• Improved Series archive pages (/resources/series/coffee-mug-verses) with description and thumbnail images before the grid of resource cards
• New image features: cropping, set hotspot (image focal point), loading placeholders, and more efficient image file formats
  • Crop: Select a rectangle out of the image to display on the site, while preserving the whole image within studio.
  • Hotspot: Set the focal point of the image; if the image is the wrong aspect ratio for where it's meant to be displayed, the system will work to keep the focal point always visible.
  • Loading placeholders: While the page is loading, the image displays a blurred, low-quality version of the image in its place. This helps reduce layout shift (article on that if you're interested) and provides greater visual continuity while the page is loading.
  • More efficient file formats: Images should load faster and use less bandwidth!
• People can now be part of multiple categories (original feature request)
• Improved 404 not-found pages
  •  Added more path-specific 404 pages. Examples:
    • https://olivet.gospel.io/resources/sermons/not-real
    • https://olivet.gospel.io/resources/not-real
    • https://olivet.gospel.io/events/not-real
    • https://olivet.gospel.io/people/not-real
  • These have better breadcrumbs and provide a better user experience when a page is unable to be found.
• Many more bug fixes and improvements throughout your site!

• Add promo image alt text on single pages
• Fix proper fallback order for og:images on single pages
• Fix Latest of Type to respect count and resource type
• Add the Divider block to accordions
• Make resource header background higher-resolution
• Fix Accordions to have properly-proportioned text and headings
• Fix Card topic link classname
• Fix Acacia header items that were misaligned
• Fix padding on Acacia Highlighted Links
• Fix Image Gallery on Acacia mobile view
• Update Latest Sermon block to have the same link styling as cards (Watch/Listen/Read)
• Fix Acacia transcript font size and fade color. 
• Fix transcript overflow issue (very long transcripts wouldn't be visible)
• Fix Events classname so that block is styled correctly (all themes)
• Fix PCO Events classname so that block is styled correctly (Acacia theme)
• Improve performance of Acacia slideshow

• Fix: Slideshow lag on Acacia theme
• Fix: Misaligned feature block with no image on Acacia theme
• Fix: Wonky Prefooter on Acacia theme
• Fix: No design on Topic label on resource cards on Acacia them
• Fix: Single Highlight Block is restored as an option on Page Content.
• Fix: Grandchild pages don't show up on the 'Child Page' block anymore
• Fix: YouTube thumbnails now show up as the social media image if a page has a Video but no Promo Image
• Enhancement: Add external redirects as well as internal site redirects
• Enhancement: Add 'Montserrat' font to Customization Settings

• Fix: PCO-integrated websites were having multiple block errors (no data loss occurred!)
• Fix: Latest Sermon/Sermons update lag (all themes)
• Fix: black and white button classes not working (Acacia)
• Fix: Topic/Series/Scripture index pages now hide from the Index nav if no entries (all themes)
• Fix: Latest Sermons block (Acacia/Anavim) now respects metadata toggles in Settings > Resource.
• Fix: Author bio pic was showing too close to name (Acacia)
• Forms now have a working redirect option on submit, as intended

Highlights:

Full Changelog:

• Fix: Anavim single resources no longer have a random link in the header
• Fix: textarea font family now matches the rest of the site
• Fix: removed double address in Olivet footer
• Enhancement: People, resources, scriptures, series, topics, and years now give proper 404 errors when a page is not found.

Highlights:

• Many bug fixes and quality assurance improvements
• New: RSS feeds for all of your resource library pages (just add /feed after a page URL)
• New: Page header image now has a global fallback option in Customization Settings

Full Changelog:

• New: RSS feeds for all resource library pages (available for author, series, and topic archive pages) Just add /feed to a normal resource archive page to see the RSS feed for that term.
• New: Page header image now has a global fallback option in Customization Settings. This will be the image set across all of your pages without a promo image, as well as your Resource Library pages (archives, indices, etc) and Events page.
• Bug: Staff Embed block now correctly lists selected staff, instead of always saying "No Staff Selected"
• Bug: Hero slideshow no longer 'flashes' on Anavim and Olivet
• Bug: Olivet pagination no longer looks 'squashed'
• Bug: 'Latest Sermons' block now correctly shows 3 sermons in preview mode.
• Bug: Prefooter, Latest Sermons, Latest Sermon (Single), and Featured Resources blocks now all have Preview states.
• Bug: Anavim event cards now display the description
• Bug: Anavim homepage display fixes
• Bug: Image block now shows a preview of the image once the page is saved
• Enhancement: Social media menu in Settings > Navigation now shows the icon of the selected social network
• Enhancement: The Pages and Resources menus now show promo images on entries, if set
• Enhancement: All theme cards now display all metadata (author, topic, series, scripture, date, and resource type) if set for a resource. Coming soon: toggle switches to set only the metadata you want on your resource cards.
• Code: Split ResourceHeader and LatestResource components apart
• Code: Major CSS refactoring, better style reusability between themes
• Code: Tests written for announcement bar on all three themes

• Added 'RSS' and 'Generic' icon options to social media menu
• Added YouTube and Vimeo thumbnail fallbacks when resources have no Promo Image set
• Added a new font to Customization Settings: Source Sans 3
• Added a 'Description' field to Resource Types -- currently this does not display on the front end, but will be added in v1.3
• All Themes: Fixed a content bug where the 'Latest Sermon' block was not showing the most recent sermon
• All Themes: Fixed a content bug where the 'PCO Events' block would cache old results
• All Themes: Fixed a content bug that erroneously displayed 4 results (instead of 3) on the 'Latest Sermons' block in preview mode.
• All Themes: Fixed a content bug where Prefooter would never show up in Preview mode
• All Themes: Fixed a styling bug with the Prefooter image.
• Olivet: Fixed a styling bug with breadcrumbs on interior pages
• Olivet: Fixed a styling bug where any block added first on the homepage did not have the right top padding
• Olivet: Fixed a styling bug that was making the 'Upcoming Events' block too wide on the homepage.
• Anavim: Fixed a styling bug that was showing footer links and text in too dark of an accent color
• Dev: Refactored the Resource Header and Latest Sermon components to be completely separate components.
• Dev: Refactored CSS directory structure and removed extraneous files
• Dev: Renamed blockStyles.scss to content.scss since it is only concerned with the content column on secondary-type pages

• Your site now supports multiple resource types (beyond Sermons!)
• Index Navigator Block: easily guide your visitors to multiple resource types and index pages
• Brand new theme, Acacia
• More font and customization options
• Additional styling quality assurance on all three themes.
• Other SEO, stability, and codebase enhancements

• Added a link to 'known issues' on the website dashboard: check this before you file a support ticket!
• Rebuilt the Latest Sermon block for better performance
• Added a robots.txt (prevents ChatGPT from using your site in its dataset)
• Removed unused code throughout the platform
• Testing suite passing at 100%
• Updated the Splash page to use theme colors
• Tweaked breadcrumbs
• Changed styling of Acacia index pages
• Buttons now inherit theme font family settings