Creating a new sermon is quite easy with SermonSpeaker. After some preparations, the user who will do the records should be able to create the sermon without any problems. So let's see what steps we need to do:
Settings
First of all, you need to make sure the user is allowed create a sermon. SermonSpeaker has default settings which are in line with the Joomla default settings. So a user in the group "Author", "Manager" or higher is allowed to do that. You can set custom permissions in the "Permissions" tab of the SermonSpeaker options. I've wrote an article earlier about SermonSpeaker 4.0 and J1.6 ACL which explains a bit more about the permission system.
If you want to use the Frontend Uploader to create a new sermon, you also need to enable this feature in the "Frontend Uploading" tab of the SermonSpeaker options.
You may also want to specify the directory in which the audio and video files will be stored. This is done in the "File Paths" tab of the SermonSpeaker options. This paths are used to populate the dropdown lists in the sermon form and are the destination directory for the uploader. Changing this paths will however not change anything in already saved sermons.
The paths need to be inside the Joomla directory and are set relative to the Joomla root.
SermonSpeaker supports storing the files outside of the Joomla directory, but not all functions will be supported then as Joomla has no direct access to the files.
Master Data
After the settings are saved, you probably want to add at least your preachers to SermonSpeaker so they can be assigned to the sermons then. You do this in the SermonSpeaker backend, in the speakers view. There is already an example speaker present named "Billy Sunday". Click on the "New" icon to create a new one, fill out at least the name and save it.
If you want to use series to group your sermons together, add these series in the series view.
The categories are fully optional. They are an additional way to filter your sermons, mainly used if you have two different events. Like a Sunday morning service and a Saturday evening youth meeting. Then you can create two categories and assign those to the sermons.
Creating the Sermon
Now we get to create our first sermon. You can do this either in the backend or with the Frontend Uploader. Either way you want to upload the audio or video file first. You can do this with an FTP client if you like, or you can use the uploader SermonSpeaker has built in. If the file is uploaded to the directory specified in the settings, SermonSpeaker will offer the files in a dropdown list for you to select. If you uploaded the file within SermonSpeaker, the file will automatically be preselected afterwards.
Clicking the little glass symbol behind the file field will look up the ID3 tags of the selected file and fill out the fields where possible. Do this or fill the fields out manually and save the sermon.
Congratulations, your first sermon is created and published!