OpenLP is a worship presentation program licensed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

version 2. It includes the ability to search through

lyrics Lyrics are words that make up a song, usually consisting of verses and choruses. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist. The words to an extended musical composition such as an opera are, however, usually known as a "libretto" and their writer, a ...

for certain words, search for Bible verses in the

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...

, display lyrics and Bible verses in a friendly way to the

congregation A congregation is a large gathering of people, often for the purpose of worship. Congregation may also refer to: *Church (congregation), a Christian organization meeting in a particular place for worship *Congregation (Roman Curia), an administra ...

and interact with popular presentation programs to provide users with an easy way to control a presentation (with LibreOffice Impress,

OpenOffice.org Impress OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) an ...

Microsoft PowerPoint Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoi ...

). It also includes easy and instant switching between slides, customisable backgrounds, a song

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, and video support.

History

OpenLP was registered on

SourceForge.net SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...

in February 2004 by Tim Ebenezer. The software was first released on 28 February 2004 as version 0.1, and contained the bare basics of the application. Version 0.4, released on 16 March 2004, was the first release with multi monitor support. On 18 March 2004, the 0.x line of OpenLP officially entered beta status with the release of version 0.5. By version 0.8, OpenLP had implemented most of the desired functionality. Version 0.994 was the last release in the 0.x series of OpenLP, and was released on 11 October 2004. In mid-2004 Raoul Snyman joined the project, and suggested some architectural changes. With this in mind, Tim Ebenezer decided to drop the 0.x line and rewrite OpenLP from scratch, with a redefined user interface. After various delays, OpenLP 1.0 beta 1 was finally released on 3 October 2005. At this stage, Tim also decided to rename OpenLP to openlp.org. After the release of beta 1, Tim became too busy to work on openlp.org, and in early 2006 Raoul took over the project. After an extensive beta and release candidate program, openlp.org version 1.0 was released on 1 February 2008. Initially, Raoul was going to work on a new version of openlp.org, version 1.2, in order to add fix up various faults in the implementation of the software, while a new group of developers would work on OpenLP 2.0, a new

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software r ...

version of the software. However, after looking at the progress of version 2.0, and consulting the other developers, Raoul decided to cease work on version 1.2. In the meantime, Derek Scotney joined the project, helping Raoul work on bugfixes for openlp.org 1.0. When Raoul moved on to help develop version 2.0, Derek continued to support version 1.0 with bug fixes. In October 2009 Derek released a new version of openlp.org that he had been working on, one that provided a backing track feature that his church needed. The OpenLP team released the first alpha version of OpenLP 2.0, OpenLP version 1.9.1, after about 18 months of development. This release was a preview release to show the community what the development team had been working on. It was at this stage that the team renamed OpenLP back to its original name. Since then, there have been releases every 3 months. After over 2 years of development, the OpenLP team released their first beta of OpenLP 2.0 on 27 March 2011. With the release of this first beta, the OpenLP team announced that there would be no more bug fix releases for openlp.org 1.2, and that the beta release should be stable enough for most churches.

Current status

Version 1.0

Version 1.0 of openlp.org is no longer maintained. It was superseded by version 1.2.

Version 1.2

Version 1.2.9 was the last stable release of the Delphi version of openlp.org. It was available for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

only. It is no longer supported.

Version 2.0

Version 2.0 was the first version written in Python and Qt4, allowing it to run on most major operating systems including

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

and

Version 2.2

Version 2.2 updated the code base to Python 3 and added support for video playback through VLC and presentation support via Libreoffice versions 4.0 and higher

Version 2.4

Version 2.4 upgraded the code base from PyQt4 to PyQt5, in order to use Qt5 and the newer capabilities of Qt5.

References

External links

*
Launchpad Project Page
* {{sourceforge, openlp Free application software Electronic Bibles Software that uses Qt Free software programmed in Python Cross-platform free software Christian software Presentation software Free and open-source Android software