We have been using the ESV.org API to display the content of our 2-year Bible reading plan on our website for several years. Recently, we launched a brand new Rock mobile app and we added the reading plan to it as well. During that process we found that the Rock mobile <Rock:BibleReader> control is a lot less forgiving than the ESV.org API, which meant that we have to go through and manually update hundreds of reading plan entries to match some very specific rules to get the mobile control to work properly.

Here are some issues that we ran into (that were not issues with the API):

• Book name abbreviations don't appear to work, or at least many of the abbreviations we happened to be using weren't recognized
• References that span multiple partial chapters can't be listed as a single range. Each chapter must be listed separately.
  • Colossians 2:6-3:11 has to be listed as Colossians 2:6-23; Colossians 3:1-11 instead
• References that include an entire book are still required to include chapter numbers.
  • Philemon has to be listed as Philemon 1
  • Nahum has to be listed as Nahum 1-3

Since running into these issues, the documentation has been updated to reflect these requirements, which is why I'm posting this as an idea instead of a possible bug.

While it would have been great to have more flexibility before we updated all of our references, I would still like to see these items changed for a couple reasons:

• If we display the day's reading plan reference on a page, it'd be much cleaner and readable to display something like:
  • Colossians 2:6-3:11
  instead of:
  • Colossians 2:6-23; Colossians 3:1-11
• I also could very easily see other situations when various staff members might need to enter in references that will be used by the Bible reader control. For example, updating a sermon podcast post to include scripture that was referenced during the sermon. Allowing for more flexibility when entering those references would prevent a lot of mistakes, questions or frustration for staff.

More details can be seen in this Rock chat thread.