Last week we released a brand new Kiosk feature that we think you’re going to love. Now you can put kiosks up in the lobby of your church to show everything that’s happening. In addition, last month we released an embeddable event list you can insert into your own church website.
Kiosks
From any event, room, resource, or folder, click the “calendar feed” button under the calendar, and make sure Event Times is selected in the toggle at the upper right. Chose the light or dark theme by clicking the theme icon, and then click the “Kiosk” button to enter your kiosk.
Kiosks auto-update and auto-scroll. That means once you load a kiosk, you can set it and forget it. As events finish, they’ll be removed from the kiosk, and when the next day starts, its events will load. If there are more events than fit on your screen, it will scroll every 10 seconds to make sure all events are seen. This allows you to display your kiosk on a TV monitor. If you choose to put it on a tablet, it becomes interactive and allows users to scroll with their fingers to find things at their own pace. Once the user has stopped scrolling for 10 seconds, auto-scrolling will resume.
When you enter your Kiosk, a red bar is displayed at the top if you are logged in. Once your kiosk is ready to go, click the logout button to dismiss the red bar, which also ensures that if your Kiosk is on a touch-screen tablet, public users can’t get back into Resources and make changes. The good news is that the web address for your Kiosk is always the same and works even when you are logged out. This makes it easy to email to someone the link, or copy and paste it on a new device, without having to log in.
Website Event List
The code for the event list you can embed in your website is available from the same place as the kiosk. From any event, room, resource or folder, click the “calendar feed” button, select the Event Times toggle at the top right, and click “embed.” From there you are shown the code you can copy and paste into your own website to have a fully searchable list of daily events. Click the preview link to view a fully functional version of the widget right within Resources.
Time Display Options
Kiosks and the website event list only display Event Times that are set appropriately. When you create a reservation, you create reservation times, which include setup all the way through tear down. You can then add Event Times that fall within the main reservation time, and specify where those Event Times should show. For each Event Time you can click “Visible on Website” or “Visible on Kiosks.”
Coming Soon
One of the next biggest things people have asked for is better traditional calendar displays within Resources. It is already possible to sync your Resources calendar with your personal calendar, but we agree that having a calendar view built in to Resources would be a great feature and it’s high on our list of priorities.
For now, we hope you enjoy these new features! To make sure you know right when those features are released, follow @pcoresources on Twitter or like our Facebook page at Facebook.com/pcoresources.