FEATURE REQUEST - DATE PICKER for Lectionary on Home Page

Does this meet your Lectionary card needs? 

Almost or I would say yes except ...there is a related issue of multiple entries for the same day, not common but it does need to be handled - on the card and from the date picker. And for some lectionaries, what is the behavior if there is no entry for the selected date?

Cases to look at to be sure you have things handled using Catholic lectionary:

• Christmas - multiple services for a single day
• Easter - vigil has maximum number of readings for a service; multiple services for a single day
• with the current state of how I can view the lectionary it's not easy to check for choice of celebration - I think Thanksgiving is an example
• no service -Saturday before Easter; any weekday for all but the daily RCL versions

If scriptures are shown one must handle

• long/short forms of the reading See Fifth Sunday of Lent 
• alternative readings See Monday of the First Week of Advent
• choice between sets of readings See Presentation of the Virgin Mary

Another issue: one should be able to place a lectionary with only future dates on the Home Page e.g. when someone build the Season of Creation lectionary as a shared PB, there is no need to build in prior dates ... and the season only includes 4 Sundays of September ... but one needs to be able to see them in advance for planning purposes.

Also please restore the ability to open just the Lectionary rather defaulting to your gargantuan layout.

I may mis-remember, but isn't this properly a matter of saving a lectionary only layout as the homepage lectionary layout? I'd prefer consistency in how defaults are overridden rather than a new mechanism ... I wouldn't be keen on different behavior if you click different places on the card unless there are a group of cards with that behavior.

I don't know if they were simplified for beginning users, but a loss of functionality is rarely good.

They were changed for a couple of reasons:

• possibly the designer not knowing lectionaries and their use intimately and running out of time for the iterative process to get it right
• for certain, the behavior of a card-style UI is intended to be very clean and simple so that it will work across a wide range of screen sizes. This results in a pick from a card/selection options on the next page style of interface ... the loss of home page functionality holds for nearly all the cards. IIRC Reading Plans manage to retain a bit of home page functionality.

I am actually more concerned with the loss of functionality in the Saints tool where it appears that an intentional change was made without understanding that it was incompatible with the L7 functionality ... even conceptually incompatible.

First, it allows the possibility of future developments along the lines of what MJ has been mentioning,

The code needs to handle them correctly whether or not they are made visible to the user.  Think of them as a minimum set of test cases that must work in the solution even if work merely means show the first you run into.

Daniel -

I have no objections to any of the options Fr. Devin suggests ... not always my first choice but nothing objectionable.

Also, I would love to customize my Homepage as my workplace. I really DO NOT like the scrolling list that currently is there. I realize it might be a generational "thing." I'm in my 70s and like things clear and simple that I control. All these cards are of was e of space and clutter up the screen. I'd like to delete/add what I want on the first screen, so I can have better functionality. This is a tool for enhancing my research; not a community gathering place. IMHO.

You have found that you can customize the top portion with the circled plus sign? It took me a while to find it so I thought I'd mention it. Customizing the bottom portion is coming.

For those who would like multiple readings listed on the card... how far in advance do you usually read? What is your primary use case for accessing different dates' readings from the Homepage? 

Thanks for helping us understand what you'd like to have here. 

I think typically one would prepare a week or two in advance, but for special feast days a month or two in advance wouldn't be strange. That being said, in v7, the calendar could handle any date within a few years, I believe. I know when Fr Andrew and I were preparing the Homiletics videos we were looking at dates 6 months to a year away from the current date and it was working properly.

As regards the different dates readings questions, there are actually two separate feature requests that have been mentioned that you might be referring to here. In both cases, the card would only display 1 liturgy and 1 date at a time.

1. List the readings of the selected liturgy - Each liturgy has multiple readings. In v6 and v7, the liturgy "card" displayed the name of the liturgical day, followed by a listing of the readings from that specific liturgy. This allowed the user to click on a specific reading, and the Liturgy Layout would open up, not only to the correct day and liturgy, but also to the reading that the user clicked on.

How did I use this, and why? It was certainly convenient to see at a glance the readings. But it was also useful for a reason that could be fixed in a design where you can't see the readings.... The Liturgy Layout opens up by default to the First Reading of the day, usually from the Old Testament or the letters of Paul. However, usually we preach primarily from the Gospel, and read the First Reading in light of the Gospel. Because of this I like to start by reading the Gospel. So, instead of just clicking to open the Liturgy Layout on the Header, I would click on the Gospel reading, so that it would open up the Liturgy Layout with the Gospel open. If this became the default behavior, for me listing the readings wouldn't be terribly important (but would be nice, just to be able to see them at a glance). 

Note that one thing that complicates this feature request from a UI perspective is that, while most Liturgies have just 3 or 4 readings - possibly pretty easy to accommodate - there are some special liturgies that have more. The most famous case is the Easter Vigil, where there are a total of 17 readings!!! 7 readings from the Old Testament, 7 Psalms, 1 reading from St. Paul, 1 Gospel Acclamation, and 1 Gospel!

2. When more than one liturgy is available on a day, allow users to choose between them - The other request, which I consider more useful (especially if the Liturgy Layout opens to the Gospel), is related to the fact that on many days there are options. Looking through the Catholic Daily Readings resource, the next date in which there are options is on November 13. The default liturgy would be "TUESDAY OF THE THIRTY-SECOND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME". However, the option is given to celebrate "SAINT FRANCES XAVIER CABRINI, VIRGIN." Ideally on a date like this, there would be some sort of indication that there are options, with a drop-down where the user could select the liturgy they prefer.

This could be something as simple as what Windows does for its audio playback. The arrow on the right indicates there are options:

When I click on it, I can see the options and select the one I want:

Chris, try your mockup on Holy Thursday of the Byzantine lectionary or the Vigil Mass of the Catholic lectionary. Will your design support these maximum cases? For the computer design perspective we have to always consider both the minimum (zero for Holy Saturday) and the maximums. I have not personally tried to work out the font size forced by extreme cases.

Nice design, Chris.

I would be fine with a "..." if the readings don't fit on some days, as long as it is designed so that on a typical weekday or Sunday they fit.