Updates This Week (March 23-28) - Congregation Hub Blog

New Features

Blog Post Comments — Public blog pages now support comments. Signed-in users comment as themselves, while guests can provide a name and email. Spam prevention uses the existing 3-layer approach (honeypot, time-based check, Cloudflare Turnstile). Super-admins can search and delete comments from a new Blog Comments admin page. Inline delete buttons also appear next to comments for the super admin directly on the blog page.

Vimeo Video Support — Sermons now support Vimeo URLs alongside the existing YouTube and Facebook options. Includes URL parsing, embed rendering, and API support. Vimeo embeds also work on the public church websites.

Notification Preferences — Users can now manage their notification preferences. The hero register button also now shows "Dashboard" for logged-in users instead of "Register." (Push notifications coming soon.)

Markdown Support — Added markdown rendering support across the websites project and fixed missing MarkdownHelper references in app-core.

Android App Testing — An Android testing group is now available. Users can sign up at https://groups.google.com/g/congregation-hub-android-testers to get early access to the Android app.

Bug Fixes

Fixed Apple in-app purchase flow
Fixed a related purchasing bug
Cleaned up debug logging

Infrastructure

Laravel 13 Upgrade — Both app-core and websites have been upgraded to Laravel 13 (via Laravel Boost).

Business & Media

Articles of Incorporation Approved — We received approval for our Articles of Incorporation, the first step toward becoming a non-profit organization.

H.B. Charles Jr. Preaching Podcast — Ryan Hayden represented Congregation Hub on the H.B. Charles Jr. preaching podcast.