Hey @kyle1490,
Sorry for the late response on this 🙁
Regarding videos, this is something we have phased out in the new layouts for several reasons and officially we won’t be bringing that back. Of course through theme overrides you can have that back if you wish. Here are some reasons why we phased that out:
- Speed – having one or more videos load/show on the Sermon archive page would affect page load speed and since all the information that adds value to each sermon is located when you click into one, we felt it was better to remove this from the Archive view as it didn’t add a lot of value and it slowed down the page loading.
- Analytics – for churches who want to measure or track how visitors are behaving on their websites, what they are looking at etc. having the videos or even audio player showing up on the archive would make analytics very hard to near impossible. The benefits of analytics can only be realized if a visitor clicks into a sermon. You can then track page views, video plays and so on. This isn’t the case if videos or audio players shows up on the main sermon listing page.
- Intent and other value add information – You can only fit so much on a sermon listing page (Archive or Taxonomy). So if sermons have notes or a transcript or anything else like a bible passage printed, all this would be better consumed when you are viewing an individual sermon. If the player for audio or video is available on the Archive, then visitors are less likely to benefit from the additional information or assets found inside each sermon page.
So those are some key reasons why we have removed the ability to show video on the Archive. We’re sorry if that causes you any inconvenience, the move was based on what we deem to be solid reasons that will benefit the majority, although we acknowledge that those reasons may not be strong enough for everyone.
We’d welcome any feedback or thoughts on that.
King Regards,
Igor
