v1.5 "Gilead"
Version 1.5 "Gilead," is our biggest release of MereChurch yet, and most of it is based on your feedback! Any feature that was added as a direct result of a feature request has been noted below.
Highlights:
This update is absolutely packed with new features, style enhancements, and quality-of-life improvements. Most notably, events blocks can now filter by category, you can now feature any resource types on your homepage, and we've launched even more theming and customization options. The full changelog is below:
Full Changelog:
- Feature: Both normal and Planning Center event blocks can now filter by an Event Category. This is great for showing, for example, only upcoming Kid's Ministry events on your Kid's Ministry page (Original Feature Request, PCO Request).
- Feature: Latest Resources by Type can select any resource type from the library and display the latest resources, in either a text or card style (Original Feature Request)
- Feature: The Staff Embed block is now called People, and can automatically pull in an entire category of People and display them automatically. This is great for adding large groups of people to a page, like Pastors, Staff, or Deacons (Original Feature Request)
- Feature: The Child Pages Links block lets you automatically add all child pages to their parent page. Great for pages like Ministries that aggregate a lot of secondary pages (Original Feature Request).
- Feature: Customize which metadata show up on your resource cards, in Resource Settings (Original Feature Request).
- Feature: new Divider block to add a horizontal rule or a spacer to your site's content.
- Feature: People can now have an optional phone number listed.
- Feature: Your MereChurch site now lists a sitemap at /sitemap.xml (great for SEO and Google results crawlers!)
- Feature: You can now add page redirects to your site, such as for creating URL redirects like /easter to /events/sunday-easter-service-2025 (Original Feature Request).
- Feature: Gospel.io now automatically redirects all URLs from WordPress' Church Content Pro, for existing clients that have migrated over from WP.
- Feature: Button theming! Highlight blocks (both 'big card' and 'fancy link' styles) can be themed, Prefooter button, Hero buttons, button groups, and the event registration button can all be themed with different brand colors.
- Style: The Poppins font is now available to use.
- Style: There are now over 16 social media icons to choose from in the site footer, including Church Center and Tithely, among many others (Original Feature Request).
- Style: The Series Index page now shows series thumbnails, when set. Optional fallback image can be set in Resource Settings.
- Style: The Video block automatically pulls a thumbnail from YouTube or Vimeo now.
- Bugfix: Image block alignments now work. Images can be aligned center, right, or left, and optionally floated to exist alongside the surrounding text.
- Bugfix: restored the Homepage "Preview" button
- Bugfix: The 'file download' button looks correct on resources that have a download but lack an audio file or video link.
- Bugfix: The Highlight Blocks in 'fancy links' style no longer incorrectly hides the block title.
- Enhancement: A page's secondary image field only shows up if the Promo image is already in use, to minimize accidental uploads to the wrong field.
- Enhancement: The Hero slideshow now shows you a selected orientation (portrait or landscape) for each image in the slideshow.
- Enhancement: Added "Preview Site" and "View Site" shortcuts on your main navigation bar.
- Enhancement: The Event single pages now has a 'Content' field that can accept any type of block (including forms) so that you can build rich, detailed Event listing pages. For current clients: the existing 'Event Blurb' field has been retained as the Excerpt on event cards.
- Enhancement: There is now an 'All Events' block that can be added to any page. This is useful if you want to override or replace the default Events page (did you know, creating a page with the slug 'events' will completely overwrite our built-in page? Use this block to surround the events calendar with custom content of your choice).
- Feature: Latest Resources by Type can select any resource type from the library and display the latest resources, in either a text or card style (Original Feature Request)
- Feature: The Staff Embed block is now called People, and can automatically pull in an entire category of People and display them automatically. This is great for adding large groups of people to a page, like Pastors, Staff, or Deacons (Original Feature Request)
- Feature: The Child Pages Links block lets you automatically add all child pages to their parent page. Great for pages like Ministries that aggregate a lot of secondary pages (Original Feature Request).
- Feature: Customize which metadata show up on your resource cards, in Resource Settings (Original Feature Request).
- Feature: new Divider block to add a horizontal rule or a spacer to your site's content.
- Feature: People can now have an optional phone number listed.
- Feature: Your MereChurch site now lists a sitemap at /sitemap.xml (great for SEO and Google results crawlers!)
- Feature: You can now add page redirects to your site, such as for creating URL redirects like /easter to /events/sunday-easter-service-2025 (Original Feature Request).
- Feature: Gospel.io now automatically redirects all URLs from WordPress' Church Content Pro, for existing clients that have migrated over from WP.
- Feature: Button theming! Highlight blocks (both 'big card' and 'fancy link' styles) can be themed, Prefooter button, Hero buttons, button groups, and the event registration button can all be themed with different brand colors.
- Style: The Poppins font is now available to use.
- Style: There are now over 16 social media icons to choose from in the site footer, including Church Center and Tithely, among many others (Original Feature Request).
- Style: The Series Index page now shows series thumbnails, when set. Optional fallback image can be set in Resource Settings.
- Style: The Video block automatically pulls a thumbnail from YouTube or Vimeo now.
- Bugfix: Image block alignments now work. Images can be aligned center, right, or left, and optionally floated to exist alongside the surrounding text.
- Bugfix: restored the Homepage "Preview" button
- Bugfix: The 'file download' button looks correct on resources that have a download but lack an audio file or video link.
- Bugfix: The Highlight Blocks in 'fancy links' style no longer incorrectly hides the block title.
- Enhancement: A page's secondary image field only shows up if the Promo image is already in use, to minimize accidental uploads to the wrong field.
- Enhancement: The Hero slideshow now shows you a selected orientation (portrait or landscape) for each image in the slideshow.
- Enhancement: Added "Preview Site" and "View Site" shortcuts on your main navigation bar.
- Enhancement: The Event single pages now has a 'Content' field that can accept any type of block (including forms) so that you can build rich, detailed Event listing pages. For current clients: the existing 'Event Blurb' field has been retained as the Excerpt on event cards.
- Enhancement: There is now an 'All Events' block that can be added to any page. This is useful if you want to override or replace the default Events page (did you know, creating a page with the slug 'events' will completely overwrite our built-in page? Use this block to surround the events calendar with custom content of your choice).