Easter weekend is over, and if you're like me, you're feeling equal parts relief, exhaustion and wishing you could do it again. A friend of mine posted on Facebook that the week after Easter should be a mandatory holiday for church employees. You wouldn't be opposed to that, would you? Well, we at Planning Center can't make that happen, but we can keep doing our best to improve PCO so that your job gets easier, so today we release integration with iTunes!
From any song arrangement page, click "Add an Attachment" and then click the new "iTunes/AmazonMP3" tab. Planning Center searches for your song in iTunes or Amazon and lets you easily link to that file. To narrow your results, try adding the artist or album name to the search to get the exact file you want. If you want to add links to the AmazonMP3 store, that has moved to this same location. To search Amazon, click the AmazonMP3 button next to the search bar.
Linking to an iTunes files does provide some benefits over Amazon. iTunes links allow you and your users to preview a 30-second sample of the song directly in Planning Center. Those 30-second previews also show up in the media player for each plan with an integrated link to go to iTunes to purchase the entire song.
If you don't use the US iTunes Store because you are in another country, we've also added a new option on the site settings page to set your country. Your site owner can change the country from the "PCO Settings" tab on the site settings page.
We've also been hard at work improving the speed of Planning Center. We have hundreds of thousands of users all around the world, so we have started using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). The simple (but not complete) way to explain this, is that instead of all users getting the Planning Center graphics and code from our servers in one location, we now have servers all over the world. Each user is automatically directed to the server located closest to them, so it should be a little faster for everyone!
We hope you enjoy these latest updates and that you're able to at least rest a little bit after Easter. We've got some exciting big new things in the coming weeks but we didn't want to overwhelm you all at once, so stay tuned! Remember to follow us onFacebook and Twitter to always have the latest information and to share the love!