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Today, OneBody 0.8.1 was tagged and the “stable” tag now points there as well. The 0.8.1 release contains many bug fixes and a few new features:

• 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

This release has some additional prerequisites and gem dependencies, so be sure to check out InstallOneBody on the wiki for help. In short, be sure to rerun the “aptitude install” command on Linux (Macs should already have the needed packages), then run “rake gems:install”.

I’m proud to announce the release of the latest and greatest version of OneBody, release 0.8.0. This represents about 4 months of steady work, including new features, theme work, performance improvements, and lots of bug fixes.

As has become the standard with this project, since this is a major release, the database migrations from all previous releases have been rolled up into a single migration. That means if you’re behind a few versions, you’ll need to upgrade to 0.7.8 first and run all its migrations. Then you can jump to 0.8.0 (or directly to any future 0.8.x release).

Also, there are new gem dependencies, so you’ll need to run a good ol’ rake gems:install to get them all installed.

Here are the high points of the release:

• 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.

For more information about various features, and upgrade instructions, head over to the wiki.

OneBody 0.7.8 is official. This will be the last release in the 0.7.x series.

Features

• 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.

Design & Usability

• 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).

Fixes

• 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.

You can download the 0.7.8 release here.

The next release of OneBody (and the current development code) has support for multiple time zones per installation. Previous releases have stored times in the local time zone, but now OneBody will store times as UTC, and then display them in the current site’s time zone (configurable in Settings).

To convert an existing installation’s times to UTC, back up your database and run the following command:

rake onebody:convert_times_to_utc

But first you’ll need to edit the lib/tasks/convert_times_to_utc.rake file to tell it what your current time zone is (so it knows how to calculate the offset to convert the time to UTC).

The latest work on OneBody has been tagged and released as version 0.7.7. As with the previous release (0.7.6), the Git tag “stable” represents the latest stable release at all times. Cap deployments by default now point to this tag, saving you some hassle with remembering to update your app (a simple “cap deploy” should do the trick).

This release, while only a minor point release, does manage to introduce a few significant features, and a whole lot of bug fixes. I’ve attempted to capture most of the changes by going back through the Git log.

Features:

• 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.

Improvements:

• 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 800×800 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.

Bug Fixes:

• 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

Depreciations/Moves:

• 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.

I’ve been working off and on with OneBody for about two years now. I’d love to say that hundreds of churches all over the country — heck, the world — are using it. But that’s just not the case. OneBody is complex software, and the number of steps it takes to get it up and running on a server can be daunting, even with all the improvements we’ve made in recent months to the setup procedure, Capistrano scripts, documentation, etc.

Still, there are geeky people in churches all over, that know OneBody could be of use to their church. If only they could have someone install it for them.

Introducing: beonebody.com.

We’re now offering hosted instances of OneBody for super reasonable rates (around $20/month). We won’t make tons of money, but hopefully we’ll be able to make connecting communities on the Web within reach of a lot of small and medium-sized churches.

Check it out.

OneBody 0.7.6 has been tagged on GitHub. This release includes several bug fixes and a pretty solid Update Agent script. First, the fixes…

Dan Taylor at PowerChurch Software has been contributing several fixes for bugs the last few weeks. PowerChurch provides a Church Management System (ChMS) solution, and they’re working to ready OneBody as an offering to their customers, fully synchronized and ready to run. Many thanks to PowerChurch for their support of open source.

* * * *

Now, to Update Agent (UA). When I first started hacking on OneBody, my church hosted the software in-house, on a server inside our building. Synchronizing data from our ChMS to OneBody utilizing the Connector was relatively fast (well, fast enough), because it was all on the same local network.

But as OneBody has grown from a little hobby project into a real product, and since our church and others are now hosting OneBody in separate VPS hosting environments, synchronization with the Connector is cumbersome and slow at best (meanwhile, it’s just painful for syncing 20,000 or more people).

OneBody now ships with an API and the Update Agent (updateagent.rb) script to ease the pain of hooking into a separate membership management database. With the ComsConnector, Cedar Ridge Christian Church performed every night a sync of 8000 people in about 1.5 hours and with hundred MBs or so of data transfer. Now, with Update Agent, synchronization takes literally minutes* and only the necessary data is transfered. REST API FTW!!1

Along with major speed improvements, the entire concept of syncing is within reach of more people. UA takes for its input a single CSV file. This should lower the barrier to entry for OneBody a notch or five.

Documentation on the wiki is still lacking, but if you’re interested in the new way to sync OneBody, crack open updateagent.rb and read the instructions at the top. I’ll be working on the docs in the next few days/weeks, and the Connector idea will be depreciated in time.

* First-time sync can still take awhile, but not every time — that’s the key.

This is something that should be done with all Rails apps as they are sucked into The Git for the first time: ignore the config/database.yml file.

Even with as much as evangelism we do regarding using Capistrano, people will still choose to deploy the simplest way they know how, by cloning directly from GitHub to the server. This creates an undesirable effect once the database.yml file is modified to suit the environment… it is seen as a modification to the OneBody codebase. Changes to this file in the origin repository get pulled down on every update, causing problems.

Unfortunately, we failed to ignore database.yml when we converted OneBody from Subversion to Git many months ago. So it has been in the repo, pointing to a SQLite db, causing problems for commiters and deployers.

Now, we’re biting the bullet and getting it done:

1. We renamed database.yml to database.yml.example
2. We added code to environment.rb that will copy the example config into place if no config exists.

The side effect is that in your deployment, when you’re ready to get up to date with the latest and greatest, doing a pull will likely rename or delete your database.yml

The fix: copy your current database.yml to a safe place, and put it back once you’ve done the pull. You should only have to do this once, and we’ll all be past this little annoyance forever. Thank you.

This past weekend saw the polishing and wrapping up of a handful features and a couple of milestones for OneBody, and the tagging of the 0.7.5 release:

• Improvements to OneBody plugin architecture.
• Start of attendance tracking for groups.
• Scheduler now reads tasks from the database rather than files with admin screen to manage scheduled tasks.
• Better contextual help for admins getting OneBody up and running.
• CMS can use a page as its template.
• REST API work, including basic authentication with API key.
• Improvements to the onebody:sites rake tasks.
• Improvements to Capistrano install and setup recipes.
• Passwords are now more securely encrypted.
• RSA encryption is used with JavaScript to provide added security when signing in and when changing user password (all without the need for SSL).
• Compression of JavaScript files to lighted bandwidth usage.
• Linked groups can now have manually added members.
• A basic REST API is now in place, along with an Update Agent script to sync your OneBody instance remotely.
• Lots of bug fixes and more regression tests.