In last week’s Friday fill-in, we showed you some of the new screenshots for key parts of Visual Liturgy. Thanks to everyone who commented on the designs and gave us plenty of food for thought. One thing we mentioned in passing was how the Lectionary Planner was changing. This week, we thought we’d show you how…
Users of VL3 and VL4 will know that the Lectionary Planner (LP) is a really good way of being able to plan out series of readings over a period of time. You can ask the LP to return a set of information (perhaps the principal service readings) for a certain set of days (perhaps Sundays and principal holy days) over a period of time (perhaps for the next month).
The planner can be saved, printed or even exported to another program like Microsoft® Word with or without the actual readings. It’s really useful for doing a readings rota and such things.
In Visual Liturgy Live, we are taking the use of the LP one step further by linking it back to services. In other words, if you plan out a set of readings and save it as a lectionary plan; the next time you create a service, you will have the option of using those readings rather than just the default lectionary options.
The way it works is that when you first install VL Live and create your first “Lectionary Plan”, it becomes your active plan. It stays active until you either create another new plan or load one that you had previously saved.
The use of plans is very similar to what we have now in VL4. You can edit the plan to either choose specific translations of readings, or change a reading or the Collect. You can delete things you don’t need or add in new things that you do.
There is always a little indicator in the status bar to show which plan is active – an example is provided below. The name is something you set when you save the plan.
Once you have an active plan and you try to create a new service, as in VL4, you will be asked to set a date for your service. However, now you will have different options as to which set of readings you wish to apply to your service.
On this particular Sunday, you can see that I can either choose to use the default set of readings for the First Sunday after Trinity with all the standard options. Alternatively, I can use the readings as specified in my active Lectionary Plan.
Now, of course, these two sets of readings may not be very different. You may be using just what the lectionary provides. However, if when opening a service, it saves you a few clicks because VL already knows that you want a certain translation, or that you want to use a particular Additional Collect instead of the default one, it should all help your service planning get a little bit quicker.
This new feature is all about getting VL to do some joined-up thinking so that what you do in one part of the software works its way through into other parts of the software.
As always, comments and questions are very welcome.