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OneBody is complicated software. There are lots of dependencies, many of which must be compiled on the server where OneBody will be running.

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See the full gallery on Posterous

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I'm pleased to announce the latest version of OneBody is available for install.

You can read the full announcement here: http://bit.ly/db93fz

Note: For this and future releases, I will post an abbreviated announcement to this blog and the full release announcement to the Google Group. This is due to the dual open-source/commercial nature of the software -- since the latest, bleeding edge features of OneBody are available at beonebody.com as they are developed, commercial customers are more interested (I suspect) in feature announcements. On the other hand, users of the open source release of OneBody should subscribe to the Google Group, and they will get announcements of full releases.

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Things have been quiet on the blog lately, but not quiet in the code! We've continued to make some minor -- but needed -- improvements to the platform.

Here are a few:

1. New Prayer Event feature to manage time slot signups.
2. Better formatting for the printed directory.
3. Groups now have file management. Use this, in addition to standard message attachments, to "pin to the top" specific files for reference by group members.
4. Messages created via the online interface can now have more than one attachment.
5. Fixes for the Google Calendar integration.
6. Numerous other small bug fixes.

We continue to work toward a 1.2.0 release to include these enhacements and fixes (and more); for those on the bleeding edge or hosted at beonebody.com, you have these already!

More to come soon...

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We've added free trials to all our hosted accounts at beonebody.com.

No credit card necessary.

If you've been holding out, waiting for a dead simple way to give our software a go, now's your chance.

You're only moments away from seeing why OneBody is different than every other church membership database.

• OneBody is the only church membership database for staff plus social network for members, all in one.
• Focus on people -- not numbers. OneBody makes connecting with people a snap.
• Give your groups an easy way to communicate online without having to manage their own email lists. OneBody is great for small groups and Sunday School classes.

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Some of the features in this release are "beta" -- meaning there will be some rough edges. I've chosen to leave them in there as I believe they make the system more usable for more people, even if there are some tough spots to work through.

I18n aka Internationalization aka Translations (beta)

Please help me to thank Gustavo Bim who has put in countless hours in extracting thousands of text strings from OneBody and translating them to Portuguese for his native Brazil. Gustavo has a heart to make OneBody available to more of the world, and I think that is simply awesome.

I'm calling this feature beta just because there are no doubt English-language strings laying around inside OneBody that were missed. We'll work to get these translated as time goes on.

iPhone/Mobile Interface (beta)

The iPhone interface has been coming along nicely, and its to the point where it's useful when you're trying to access your church community site while on the go. Again, this is beta simply because there are some minor annoyances we need to fix. But at this point, I believe the functionality is worthy of inclusion.

Integration with Donor Tools, Campaign Monitor, and Sermondrop.

Similarly, you can now use Campaign Monitor to send your quality designed email newsletter to groups of people you've set up inside OneBody -- all without re-keying information.

Sermondrop is an amazing service for hosting your church's audio podcasts. OneBody easily integrates with Sermondrop so your members can find podcasts quickly directly from within your commuinity site.

Relationship Management

OneBody has always had the concept of families and has allowed you to easily manage individuals in a family. And now, you can quickly map relationships between individuals as well. Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, Aunt, Uncle, Cousin, etc. -- as detailed as you want to be.

Admin Templates, and more!

If your community site has several administrators, it can be tedious to set up individual permissions for each one. Admin "Templates" now allow you to set permissions for a group of people with one go.

...

There are tons more enhancements, fixes, and refinements detailed in the Changelog. Definitely check it out!

Download

Too Huge!

This release took too long and is just plain too big. There are 34,000 lines in the diff between 1.0.0 and 1.1.0!

I intend to shorten the release cycle for OneBody over the next few months. Expect to see a leaner, more focused release next time, and hopefully not 5+ months from now. Release early, release often, as they say.

Blessings.

-Tim

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We're still working to make the 1.1 release avaialble to everyone, but there are some things to wrap up before we do. In the meantime, the latest edge code has been pushed to beonebody.com for our current customers.

Some of the improvements include:

1. Super Admins are no longer managed through the Settings screen. Instead, add Super Admins in the same way you manage standard administrators.
2. Donor Tools integration for contribution tracking.
3. Campaign Monitor integration for mass mailings.
4. Sermondrop integration for podcast hosting.
5. New group batch editing interface.

...and, of course, lots of little fixes here and there.

Also, we're proud to announce our small (but growing!) help section at beonebody.com/help. Check there for how-to guides and screencasts for basic and advanced topics about your OneBody site.

If you have feedback about any of the items we mentioned here (or anything really), please don't hesitate to comment or send us an email at support@beonebody.com.

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It's been 3 months since OneBody 1.0 was released to the public. While this blog has been quiet during that time, the project most certainly has not. As of this post, the changelog shows nearly 11 major new features, 17 bug fixes, and 29 general refinements and improvements.

Some of the new features include...

Multiple Languages: English and Portuguese

I'm excited to announce that OneBody will soon be available in a language other than English! The first job is huge: every page in the app has to be combed over and every string of text replaced. Thanks to Gustavo Bim for his amazing job, the task is nearing completion, and Portuguese will be the first language other than English.

Site administrators will be able to select the language for their site to meet the needs of their community.

Once this work is done, adding other languages will be much simpler and faster. Expect to see other translations soon after.

Reporting Engine

Built on the power of MongoDB, OneBody will soon have powerful reporting capability.

We're still working on the report output functionality and formats, but the report building interface is mostly done at this point.

iPhone Interface

Utilizing the jQTouch framework, we've created a slimmed down web version of OneBody, specifically for the iPhone, Android, and other mobile devices. There are still a few rough edges to iron out, but we're close.

And a whole lot more...

• Interface for managing relationships between people.
• Improvements to the admin dashboard, including graphs.
• Sync api and interface for viewing synchronization results (UpdateAgent).
• Add changed emails interface in admin section.
• New Admin "Templates" feature.
• Way better handling of deleted records, and an interface to manage them.

Stay tuned!

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I am pleased to announce the release of OneBody version 1.0! This has been three years in the making, and I'm super excited to make it available to churches all over the world.

Changes since 0.9.1 are light, but that was the plan. No new features means no new bugs, right? ;-)

• New Debian package release.
• New virtual appliance (OVF) release.
• Ability to add/remove group memberships from profile edit page.
• Improvements to the layout of the administration section.
• New rake task for modifying settings (even hidden and global ones) from the command line.

If you've been holding off installing OneBody, now is the time! This is the first release where we've started to provide some great and easy new ways to install the software, including a Debian package and a virtual appliance (OVF) for use in VMWare or other virtualization tools.

See the wiki for more download details.

And as always, we continue to offer the most advanced and full-featured software for church social networking at beonebody.com, starting at $25/month.

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This is primarily a bug-fix release, but also has some added functionality.

Notable in this release is the preliminary support for Ruby 1.9 (1.9.1 to be exact). While I don't yet recommend running OneBody on Ruby 1.9 in production, it does seem to be stable enough for testing and development, and comes with some hefty speed improvements.

Also in this release is a new rake task that builds a Debian package for OneBody, for installation on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (it may also work on other Ubuntu releases and Debian-based distros, but I haven't tested that). I hope to release OneBody 1.0 as a deb package in addition to the usual way I release via tagging in GitHub.

Download 0.9.1 here. Changes:

• Fix bug when normalizing bible verse reference.
• New Debian package building task. Needs more testing.
• Update install cap recipe to install latest Rubygems.
• Add group batch editing feature at /groups/batch.
• Fix bug getting/setting lines-based settings.
• Fix bug deleting stale pid in script/inbox.
• Expire cache when tour starts or stops.
• New admin interfaces for checkin module (separate, unreleased code).
• New admin interface for attendance.
• Initial support for Ruby 1.9.
• Hide repetitive stream items on stream page.
• Dramatic speed ups to stream page.
• Cache stream items.

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I'm happy to announce that OneBody 0.9.0 is now available for general consumption. This release represents several months of major revamps of the interface, improvements to the internals, lots of refinements, and the psychological jump right to the edge of 1.0.

I hope to make this (0.9.x) a relatively short series, with 1.0 a few weeks away. That is, if there are no major bugs found and everyone is happy with how the interface looks and acts (which most people seem to be enjoying so far).

Enough talk, here are the details:

• Upgrade to Rails 2.3.4
• New "stream" metaphor on home, profile, and group pages.
• Feed import: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Improved visual cues for certain interface items.
• Improved group editing interface.
• New Site Tour feature; shown upon first login.
• Link to YouVersion and eBible on verse page.
• Allow admins to remove themselves from albums and pictures.
• Add option to albums to be public or profile-only.
• Set the first uploaded pic in an album to the cover pic.
• Add feed for stream page.
• Improved wall posting feedback.
• Improved site selection from console.
• Improved email header reading/writing.
• Safeguard to prevent script/inbox from running more than one process at the same time.
• Added Yahoo map to group page.

Make sure you run the database migrations when upgrading to this release. Also, since we rolled up the migrations yet again, you'll need to upgrade to 0.8.1 (if you haven't already) and run the migrations there before you can upgrade to 0.9.0.

As always, if you need help, shoot an email to the Google Group and we'll be happy to give you a hand.

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The main site for OneBody (beonebody.com) has been refreshed in its design tonight. The updated design and screenshots do a better job of introducing our awesome software and showing what it does and what it looks like.

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• Upgrade to Rails 2.3.2
• New Calendar tab with merged church-wide and group calendar events (thanks to PowerChurch)
• Ability to comment on pictures (thanks to PowerChurch)
• New "Tabbed Profile" option
• User generated News section
• Low level support for syncing a group with a Campaign Monitor subscriber list
• Feed auto-discovery for publications, friend activity, and news
• Allow HTML content in emails
• Ability to have multiple Publications groups
• Speedups for viewing large groups
• Improved News RSS feed grabbing
• OneBody plugins are now Rails engines
• Cap recipes to install/deploy on Ruby Enterprise Edition

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• Upgrade to Rails 2.2.2
• Custom theme editing.
• Custom people fields.
• Fixed Twitter integration.
• Scheduler is gone. Crontab is our friend again.
• Improve performance of profile page by eliminating/consolidating sql queries and making use of MySQL indices.
• Simplify person gender to only use Male/Female/nil.
• Improve performance by storing settings in a global instead of class variable.
• Improve performance by denormalizing blog items into separate table.
• Remove some plugins from vendor and include as gem dependencies.
• Better report following people import, including errored records and reason(s).
• Simplify profile page look.
• Improved search.
• Groups now have pictures.
• Speed up group memberships, especially linked groups and "parents-of" groups.
• New group membership privacy controls.
• Improve update submission process and interface.
• Use popup date picker for birthday and anniversary selection.
• New option to specify updates must be approved or not.
• Catch bots signing up for account using a dummy hidden field.
• New option to groups to allow users to join without requring admin approval.
• New settings to change default sharing/privacy options for new families.
• New solucija_ib theme.
• New solucija_im theme.
• Tons of bug fixes.

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• 0.3.0 was a bogus release I had up on RubyForge for like a couple of hours I think.
• 0.3.0, in the timeline of OneBody development, was February. That's a long time in open source development world -- especially on a non-dead project.
• This was back when we vendored Rails and several other goodies. You know, before Rails 2.1 was released.

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• Upgrade to Rails 2.1.2
• Add site time zone support. Add rake task to convert existing times to UTC.
• Add l10n phone and date formatting options.
• Add optional embedded Google Calendar to groups.
• Add setting to allow unencrypted logins (for mobile phones, etc.)
• Allow system and help page editing even when CMS feature is disabled.
• Do a "soft delete" on people and families.
• Ability to add existing person to a family.
• Add setting to enable/disable email relaying for people with their email addresses shared.
• Track sign in failures and lock out account/ip based on configuration setting.

• Change generic group picture to be more consistent with site design.
• Design and usability tweaks thanks to Ben Hudson.
• Show randomly-selected, limited number of "groupies" on profile with link to show all.
• Add Yahoo Map link next to profile home address (Ben Hudson).
• Populate Directory search name field from quick search box (Ben Hudson).
• Change appearance of private group.
• Show hidden people when doing a select_person search (admins only).

• Fix friendship mirroring bug.
• Work around WYSIWYG editor escaping special syntax for inserting setting values.
• Fix bug saving family upon new account signup.
• Use male silhouette for thumbnail as fallback when gender is not set properly.
• Fix friend reordering.
• Fix bug displaying upcoming birthday icons.
• Don't show duplicate items in the blog.
• Don't send duplicate message to group member who received an email out of band.
• Don't crash if friend has been deleted.
• Fix family member reordering.
• Fix log item view when showing a comment on a deleted item.
• Fix CSV import creating duplicate families; Add access/permission options to import.
• Fix add verse on existing verse.
• Fix bug showing Prayer Request in activity feed.

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• Add community logos.
• Allow "off the street" signups for certain types of communities. Sign ups can either be required to be approved by an admin or auto-approved.
• Directory can now be printed with family pictures.
• Added ACS Converter to Update Agent.
• Add legacy/external id editing to person edit form.

• How group listings are displayed
• Appearance of site header and slogan
• UpdateAgent moved to new GitHub project: seven1m/onebody-updateagent
• Group create/edit experience.
• Form feedback and textarea styling.
• Security of mass assignment in profile editing.
• Appearance of buttons and tabs.
• Reject mail from/to postmaster.
• Resize photos to 800x800 max and discard original (this will save hundreds of megabytes of disk space for sizable communities).
• Add hook to restart scheduler after a standard cap deploy.
• Ease up log flagging a bit.
• Set cap deploy.rb example config to checkout "stable" branch by default
• Update Setup mode to know about stable release vs dev release.

• Capistrano deployment recipes
• Bug sending body of email when attachment present
• Fix bug preventing people being moved to a new family.
• Fix dates of 0000-00-00 in MySQL.
• Rake newuser task should add to super admins, not overwrite it.
• Fix bug creating new site publications group.
• Fix new note ownership.
• Fix group category selection and form feedback.
• Add Publications group for new sites.
• Generate api key in onebody:api:key rake task if not present.
• Batch compare and update should take site_id into account.
• script/inbox should not take --site arg since it is determined by Notifier#recieve anyway.
• Fix bug detecting secondary host.
• Fixed incremental search for City and State
• Fix group membership admin page

• Connector and sync script has been depreciated. Please use UpdateAgent from now on.
• UpdateAgent has been moved into its own project. Installation is only a "gem install" away.

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