Last October we announced that the Plans tab would be splitting into two pages. My Schedule was released a couple months ago as a page where all users manage their personal schedule. Today the Plans page itself was updated and improves the experience of finding any plan.
This page isn't as different as many of our other new pages have been, but there's a lot of polish and few new things. Here's what's new!
Plans Calendar
The calendar on the left of the page is a completely different calendar than the My Schedule calendar, and contains events and times for all the plans within the current folder.
If you are scheduled to any of those plans, you'll see a dot in the actual calendar for any day you are scheduled for, and in the list view below, you'll see a full icon for your status.
The list view gets a heading for each day that contains a service, rehearsal, or other time. Within that day, you'll see any plans that have a time on that day, followed by those specific times.
Even though this calendar isn't a calendar of your entire schedule, by including status icons for plans that are in your schedule, it gains the new functionality of seeing all times in the current folder, but without completely losing the context of which of those times are assigned to you as an individual.
Folder Navigation
We've improved folder navigation in two ways. First, if you have more than one sub-folder, we're now showing the complete path in the header rather than just the current folder and its parent.
This helps you have better context for where you are, but it also allows you to click any part of the folder navigation to jump directly to that folder. If you are 2 folders deep, you can jump back to the root level with one click.
We've also improved folders by stacking them horizontally. When you have Service Types in the same folder as other sub-folders, your Service Types are higher on the page since the sub-folders don't take as much room.
Previous Plans
The plans shown in a Service Type are the upcoming plans by default, which hasn't changed. However, there is now a more flexible way to get to previous plans. Click on the column header that says "upcoming" and choose an option from the list.
The predefined date ranges allow you to get plans since 1, 3, 6 or 12 months ago, making it easy to jump back a year in just 2 clicks. But if you are looking for a specific date, you can choose custom, and click that date in the calendar.
Series Art
Some churches use Series Art or Series Titles for their plans, and some don't. The old design had a Series column for everyone, regardless of if they used it or not. The new design hides that column completely for any Service Type that doesn't use that feature.
Service Type Attachments 👋
The old page had a column in every Service Type for uploading attachments to the Service Type which would be displayed in every plan. Now that they can be uploaded from the new Service Type Settings page, and most people get to those files from within plans, we've removed the column from the Plans page.
Matrix
The Matrix buttons have mostly remained the same, with one exception. Since My Schedule is now its own tab, we still wanted to provide a way to get to a Matrix that contained all the plans you are scheduled for without having to go to another page. To load a "My Schedule" Matrix, click to view options for the Matrix button at the top of the page, click the folder name, and then click My Schedule.
Up Next
Next up are new versions of the main Songs and Media pages. Then later this year we'll start work redoing the individual plan pages. That page will take quite a while to say the least, so we don't know when it will be done. Stay tuned!