<p>Hi all,</p>
<p>First of all, I would like to thank you for the big effort that all developers already put into OpenLP. It's looking great and promising. As the AV team of our church is in need of a proper, modern piece of software to use in our services, OpenLP is investigated together with OpenSong. I personally like the more 'professional' approach of OpenLP. It looks to me that the used tecjnology and it's functions will make it easier to maintain and better to expand.</p>
<p>However, OpenLP still asks more skills of the people in our AV team. Mainly this will be addressed by simply using the software several times. But OpenLP has some issues on usability. By making some requests I hope to serve the project and maybe get some answers to look into possibilities I didn't find yet.</p>
<p>First of all there is the custom slide usability. We use this function a lot in every service. The custom slide setup in the Media Manager is a fine way to make a kind of a template. You can add several instances to the Service Manager (based on the same template) and edit it there ... so far so good. The editted content however becomes part of the Media Manager. Editting the second instance is not possible anymore: instead the content of the Media Manager will appear.</p>
<p>What I would like to request is</p>
<p>1) to make the instance in the Service Manager a copy, not linked in any way to the Media manager anymore. When you edit the instance in the Service Manager, I'd expect to get that specific content. I don't want to edit the template in the Media Manager.</p>
<p>2) when saving the service, closing OpenLP, starting it again and loading the former service, it is not possible to edit Custom Slides anymore. That's too bad, because these type of slides are often used for messages that can change on the last moment in service.</p>
<p>For us, the requested usability function is of great importance. We prepare our services at home and send them to the church-PC. Therefore adding a lot indivual custom slides in Media Manager isn't a nice way to work, not even possible. Maybe there are some thoughts about this and the way it functions now is on purpose. Then I'd like to know how you look at it. Maybe we're doing something wrong - that's okay :-)</p>
<p>I've noticed that kind of the same behaviour is used for the songs, but since songs don't change by their content (normally), this is no problem. I can imagine however that the same strategy can be used for songs: make a copy, not a link, to the Service Manager ...</p>
<p>Thanks and greetings,</p>
<p>Eelco</p>
<p>[Using Windows Vista SP2, OpenLP 1.9.8]</p>