ICF Church

Last month we made a lot of small improvements and solved some bugs. We added the language switcher to the profile dropdown to help change the language faster, we added the possibility to add the thumbnail to the resource detail page, and we solved several thumbnail bugs to bring that to the next level. 🚀

As always we also integrated a few other things, changed small stuff, and solved different bugs ✌️

We will stay tuned and keep you up-to-date!
If you have any feedback contact us or post your request directly to our EQUIP Roadmap

Your Digital Team 😊

With these two releases, we have finally managed to activate the PDF Preview for Mobile and desktop so that you can preview PDF documents on EQUIP before downloading them. 📑 ⬇️

We also integrated a few other things, changed small stuff, and solved different bugs ✌️

We will stay tuned and keep you up-to-date!
Your Digital Team 😊

WE ARE CELEBRATING A NEW EQUIP UPDATE ❤️🎉

We did it again! We have published a major update of EQUIP - We now have Favorites!

You can now:

🤝 Save your favorite resources as favorites
🙌 See an overview of your favorites in your profile at any time
✌️ You can filter & sort your favorites
👏 You can recognize your favorites anywhere on EQUIP by the ❤️

Test the new feature
👉 https://icf.church/equip

Have fun 🎉
Your Digital Team

With these three updates, we switched our picture hosting from tiny.pictures to imgix to save money. We also integrated a few other things, changed small stuff, and solved different bugs.

A lot has happened since our last release. That's why we're also combining versions 2.1.0, 2.1.1 & 2.2.0 here.

The Profile Page and the Church Invite Page have been completely renewed. Everything is now easier to navigate, more beautiful, mobile-friendly, and has several more functions. Feel free to test the new functions https://icf.church/equip.

We also have a new view for resources 🎉 You can now look at the resources in a table view and easily filter and sort them. The resources are now also displayed on several pages.

We were able to fix some bugs and also implemented some new things. You can see the complete list below if you are interested in the details.

Have fun ✌️

🤩 A NEW LOOK FOR EQUIP! 🤩

For some time now, we’ve been working on something exciting in the background. 

We are thrilled to finally be able to present EQUIP to you in its new design. It has never been easier to find inspiring resources for your church on our platform! 

From now on, you can also use EQUIP cleanly on your mobile. 
We hope you like the improved platform! 👏

Hey there, and welcome back!

It's been a really long time since you last heard from us. Sorry about that. We did however try to make this release count - and we think we did just that! 💪

While it might seem like a minor thing, actually improving the search makes all the difference for the user. You see, searching is at the core of almost all online behaviour. There's a reason that "googling" has become a verb, and I always chuckle when I hear sentences like "Just Google it on YouTube!" (which is technically less wrong than it first sounds - but I disgress... 🤔)

We wanted to give our users the search experience they deserve and are used to on the internet, which is far more difficult than it first sounds - if we try to do it ourselves. Our search worked, and mostly returned the results one would expect - but the performance was, let's say, mediocre at best. 😐 We spent a lot of time investigating what could be improved to boost performance - and I mean a LOT of time - without much success. After all, building search is not easy. ... or is it?

Enter Algolia!

Algolia offers a hosted search API for sites like ours to use. Basically we just provide the data to be searched, and they handle the actual search request - complete with typo tolerance, custom rankings and more advanced features like synonyms or rules. All those features are nice and all - but they're not what we were after. Our #1 priority was improving the performance of our search, while still making sure our users receive the results they'd expect. That was our requirement to Algolia... and boy, did they deliver! It's not just fast, it's - well, look: 👀

Yes, that's one ms. No, I didn't click multiple times to get that result. 🤷‍♂️

Just try it for yourself! It's really fast!

While we're at it...

Just as the search got so fast, it became really apparent that large images take some time to load. I mean, who wants to wait on the images loading after you already see the search results being generated? So - we fixed it. Usually one would go about and automatically resize the image to the required dimensions on their own servers (requiring processing power), save it for future requests (requiring storage) and then deliver it to the user (requiring bandwidth). What if there was someone who already did all that? Turns out: there is!

tiny.pictures is a service that acts both as a reverse proxy and as a CDN, all while being able to apply a variety of operations on the source image. Sorry, what was that? 🤔 Alright, again: The search thumbnails are now loaded from tiny.pictures. If they don't have the image yet, they load it from our server once, then resize it, crop it (even trying to keep faces in focus) and save it on their servers. For every following request they just immediately return the small version - resulting in lightning fast image load times! ⚡️

Alright, but what else?

Of course, there are a few other things here and there. Most of them are minor reworks, some small tweaks here and there. We'll list a couple of them below.👇

Thanks for reading!

As always, if you have any suggestions or ideas, or just wanna give us feedback: we're more than happy to hear from you! Get in touch! 🙂

Over the past few weeks, we have reworked large amounts of our code base to make the site faster and more secure. We have also improved the way files are previewed:

Old way:

Shiny new previews:

We have redesigned our homepage for you. Featured resources are now front and center and the resources of categories you follow are now more prominent. We also redesigned and streamlined the navigation.There you'll find a new category overview as well as your user settings.

In this release, we improved the onboaring for new users:

ICF Equip is our new resource platform, created to empower you and your local church.