StreamingFaith.com conducted this interesting interview with Seth Godin discussing how the church isn’t doing a very good job of reaching people with their message in today’s new “marketing era”.  I really like his observations on the usefulness of blogging - something that I think the church is way behind on…check out the interview at, Is Today’s Modern Church Busy Making Meatball Sundaes?

Well it’s official (and I can announce now). I’m going to be starting a new ministry as the Assistant Pastor of Waterloo Pentecostal Church. I’m really looking forward to this new position and working with the leadership team there. It’s absolutely incredible (and I confess a bit of a whirlwind too!) the journey God has been bringing my family and I through this past two months. I’ve posted more information and thoughts about this change on my family blog. You can read more there.

We’re going to conclude our look at the Series Options page in this post by looking at the “Latest Series” Template and the Series Icon Options.

Here’s what the “Latest Series Template” option field looks like (WP2.5):

This is the one template option that is not automatically added to your blog. The contents of this template control the output of the latest_series() function or the latest series widget. You can insert the latest_series() function wherever you want it to appear in your blog (manually into your theme files) or you can simply use the built in widget if you have widgets enabled for your theme.

This is how the default Latest Series output looks on my blog (to the left):

Of course like the other template options on the series options page you can use different tokens to control the contents of the latest_series() ouput.  For instance you might want to use the %series_title% token to display the series title instead of the series icon.  In future versions of Organize Series I’ll be adding more tokens that you can use.

For those not familiar with what the Organize Series WordPress plugin is or does - please visit this page.

This is a pretty significant changeset that fixes some things with the Series Table of Contents page:

• Series Table of Contents page now returns the correct header (’200′). It was returning ‘400′ before the fix. see this thread.
• NEW FEATURE: You can now indicate what the browser title bar will say on Series Table of Contents page via the Series Option settings in your admin. The default will be “Series Table of Contents Page”
• Fixed a conflict with “All In One SEO Pack” plugin affecting Series Table of Contents Page.
• Thanks to gnouros for detecting and testing my fixes of the above errors for me!
• Shortened the “official” plugin name to “Organize Series” to match the directory in the svn repository - hopefully this will fix the indicator not showing up in your plugin list for when there’s a new version of Organize Series out. See this post in the WP Support Forums.

Just thought I’d post a quick update that the current stable version of Organize Series is 2.0.3. Here’s a summarized change set since orgSeries 2.0:

• 2.0.1 - some fixes so that changing the SERIES_URL definition in orgSeries.php actually works (you can use this to pick how you want the series-archive permalinks to look - important for avoiding conflicts with existing category permalinks…)
• 2.0.2 - fixed Organize Series causing problems with other plugins that create their own top-level menus in your WordPress Administration. Previous to this fix you’d get ‘404′ errors on subpages of those plugin menus.
• 2.0.3 - I noticed that orgSeries 2.0.2 broke the “add series on the fly” feature on write/edit post pages (and also affected the layout of those pages). This release fixes that.

I thought I had nailed all the bugs before releasing Organize Series 2.0 - but of course, as it usually is, once code get’s in the wild all sorts of nasty creatures pop up

If you haven’t yet - I encourage you to download Organize Series 2.0.3.

If you’ve never heard of my Organize Series WordPress plugin feel free to read about it on it’s own nifty page.