Podcast Episode 190: Episode 163: Features, Functions and Fixes

Description

Catch up with Rock's Core Team- Jon Edmiston, Emily Forman and Nick Airdo as they discuss all the features that will be coming in Rock's latest version and the freshly released Rock Mobile v5.0. Show Notes:Alpha/ Beta Testing: https://community.rockrms.com/get-involved/role/alpha-beta-testersRock Release Notes: https://www.rockrms.com/releasenotesRock Mobile v5.0 Release Notes: https://www.rockrms.com/mobilereleasenotes https://mobiledocs.rockrms.com/RX24: https://rx.rockrms.com/Hotel Registration Link: https://www.marriott.com/event-reservations/reservation-link.mi?id=1694551025506&key=GRP&app=resvlink2024 Classes: https://community.rockrms.com/classesRock PartnersWe are thankful for our Rock Partners and their support of the Rock Community. Visit their websites through the link above to learn how they can help your ministry and confirm that those you work with are as invested in the success of Rock as you are!

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to this edition of Rockcast, the podcast that explores the intersection of technology, ministry, and community with ROCCRMS. I am Emily Forman, and with me today, of course, are Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo. We are going to talk Rock. Nick, kick it off. I will kick it off with some updates about Rock versions. We are currently in the midst of a 15.3 alpha test phase. It's only a handful of people testing it, but it's a relatively simple, straightforward release of Rock. It's got a lot of polish or fixes for the Obsidian event registration block. We kind of put a lot of time and energy into that. All those fixes from 15.3 will be in the 16.1, which will be going into alpha within a week or so. But 15.3 should be going beta by the time this podcast hits the streets. 16.1 has tons of other fixes. we've been pouring lots of fixes into 16. I think we talked a little bit about it last We swept through the GitHub issues. We're just trying to crunch that down to the inflow of issues that come in and get rid of all the old ones. We fixed lots of older issues. So sixteen point one has a lot of those fixes. Great. Very exciting. We did touch on that last time and we've got a really cool pace going on with that. So good work to the dev team for being able put that attention on there and plowing through those issues. And John. John really led the charge and was- But you said he didn't all the issues. So I'm , okay. Time to handle that. Didn't want you to spend your evenings though, but thank you. And the whole community thanks you and everybody. Well, a lot of developers have been putting a lot of time into that. So it's definitely been a team effort. Yep. Were temporarily under 60 on Friday when I left and then still came back. It went up to 65. We got it back down. It's been a little bit of a battle. I closed one last night. Yep. Thank you. Yep. It's always a little bit of back and was pretty easy one. Documentation said how to do it. Thank you also for the Those happened, that's fair. Thank you for the great write ups. That makes it a lot easier to close issues with Yeah, say most of our issues are really well written in. Now sometimes we have a hard time reproducing it, but it's always on the write up. If we say we can't reproduce it, that's not a judgment of your write up. It's just sometimes there's a small edge step that we don't know how to hold your mouth right, is how my grandfather would say it. You're just not holding your mouth right. We just don't know how to hold our mouth for that one. And so the back and forth dialogue really helps a lot too. Yeah. And videos, screenshots, always thankful when we get those. Some write ups are just lacking any sort of significant detail. And those are the hard ones. Yeah. And our new policy on that is we're going to, well, we can't reproduce it. We're going say, Hey, could you help us reproduce it? Then we'll probably wait about eight to ten business days and then we'll probably close it. And you can always reopen it. Whoever opened the original issue can always reopen it. So don't take that as we're being resistant. We're just trying to keep our count low. The more issues that are in there, just the number of them takes so much longer to do. Because we have to re figure out, okay, what's the state of this one? So if we can keep that kind of clean, it's not that we're trying to purposely reduce account. It's just much more efficient, the fewer issues that we have in there. And there's still some issues in there we need to go through because there's still some that don't make sense. They're kind of older ones. So we'd to get that count down probably about half of what we have today and then keep that as a metric to keep it at that. Of course, we always it to be zero, but there's just some that we know we need to fix, we know it's a bug, but we can't fix it that minute because there's something else we're waiting for. So there'll always be a little bit of a backlog. But if you consider how big Rock is to have 59 active issues- That's incredible. Go to another system that doesn't report them, they're going to have hundreds, perhaps thousands of open issues. Yeah, did that recently. I said, Well, let's just go compare what another CMS has, Orchard. And I was so shocked that they had 1,800, I think. And the thing that the proprietary bug tracking systems that every CHMS vendor has, I'm sure there's just gobs of open issues. But we're not asking you to dig deep and find more. No. Just give us the ones that are impacting your ministry and we're happy to look at those. And join the alpha and beta testing teams if it makes sense and help us figure all of that out in the testing phase, which is ideal. Absolutely. Now there is danger too that the issue, because there's so much attention and traction in there, it could turn into a help desk. And so, if you're listening to this and you want to moderate that, you can also tag issues as not really an issue and that's helpful too. Answer, say, Hey, it's actually in the documentation right here. If you have some extra time and interest, that would be helpful too. Definitely check out our Get Involved page on the community site, and you can see that option along with many others. And for all skill sets, we could definitely use the help. All right, John, what are we working on right Oh, nothing. We took the week off. Oh, good. Yeah, didn't have anything else to do. No, it's been busy. A lot of planning for V17, just trying to get the feature set dialed in. And I think what's been challenging is how to get the different features that we want to do to align with each other. So things adaptive messaging, how does that align with email? It's really actually hard because we're trying to make emails super, super easy for the Alicia Marbles of the world and trying to get the power of adaptive messaging to also have the simplicity of that. Or having to add some stuff, all good stuff. And also trying to figure out how to do some clever things. So that's been a challenge, trying to get the V17 features ready. There's a couple that are already ready, but I'm trying to get the requirements done. Also been working on with the team, of course, the new V2 API. And again, that's going to be really, really cool. The search capability of that is going to blow minds. And that's coming along pretty well. I think we still have a little bit of work to do, but it's mainly the hard stuff's done, it's just some of the tedious stuff. It takes a little bit of time, but it's pretty much downhill from here. Also just been working on things discussions with New Relic. They found out about our integration and there's some believers in that company. In fact, a CEO, I found out today, a believer and that's why he does a lot of the charity programs. Very cool. So they're impressed with what we're doing and trying to figure out how do they get more How do they make it easier for people to get on their platform? And so we're going to update our documentation that helps them get the nonprofit discount. So that was really cool. And I think we're going to try to meet up and there's still a few more technical things we would to have some answers to on OpenTelemetry as it relates to New Relic. So that's really positive. There's also a migration on the Spark side this week to move from NMI to the full MyWell gateway. And so sometimes that's a bit of a confusing topic. The past, it was myWILLNMI. And my was the gateway, myWILL was kind of the provider. And now myWILL has a different gateway that's better than NMI in a lot of ways. And so we decided it was worth our time and effort to port over to that. That transition went super smooth. No one had to change their cards, no one had to do anything. Super smooth, love the new interface that the new gateway that MyWell has provides, just really great. So that went well. We still have one more bit to move over. So that way, they handled all of our giving, event registration, a majority of our transactions. The Rock Shop actually uses a different gateway because it goes all the way back to the pre-one-zero days when we had Rock Shop and that uses the PayFlo Pro gateway, which we're all aware is going away. Not recommended. Yeah. So from PCI compliance perspective, and it's, back then there wasn't all these new technologies. So it's written towards an older version of that. So we still have to do that transition and we probably will be doing that the next couple of months. In some ways it'll be easier, in some ways it'll be harder because the transitioning of the saved accounts we think is possible. We may not go down that path because there's just not that much to it, but everybody might have to in the future, re provide a credit card before they go do their store, their next purchase, which won't be too big of a deal, but then we'll be fully on my well and everything will be polished, which we've been wanting to get off PayFlo Pro for probably about six years. So this is now finally forcing us to do it. So that'd be a good cleanup step. So really happy with that and how smooth that was. But we also had the opportunity to work with the engineering team at MIWELL. Were wanting to partner with us to fix the, not really fix, but enhance the ability to do settlement batches. So your financial transaction batches in Rock could match the settlement batch as it comes out. That's always been hard because there's this tension of, Hey, we want to know our data right now. The pastor wants to know how many people gave this weekend versus having to wait till everything settles because you can't really put it in your bank until we know if it clears everything. And so there's that time it takes. So we in the beginning had kind of leaned towards, well, pastor wants to know, get it in there, then the batches might just have to be different. Well, we can have our cake and eat it too. And so we've been wanting to do that for a while, but it's just hard because we had to coordinate with a lot of things and we don't understand some things about gateways and MiWel came along and said, Hey, we're willing to help you figure this out on your side. And of course they get a benefit that now anybody, any gateway can take advantage of. So it's built into Core. It's an open API there to do that, but it was helpful that they would come alongside and invest time in helping us understand what we would need to change and how all that works. So that was really great that we were able to get that done. And I just love the fact that churches can now know what their transactions are and have it simple, the ability to reconcile that. So it was a win win win, I think, for everybody. We also released the mobile app version five, which is a big update, lots of things in there, too numerous to go through all of them. But one of the things I think I would highlight is the ability to make staff apps. So Rock Mobile, , it's a one point release and all releases since then was really focused on creating apps for your members and attendees. And this now adds other capabilities to do some staff app type things. So there's a person profile page that you can put on there. Now you could have done that yourself, doing some lava templates and everything, but this gives you some really great things to hook into. And there's some new searching for the group member block has a lot more capabilities in terms of searching, some new authentication options for Auth0, lots of cool stuff. Go read the mobile release notes, all the details are there. And so that's super exciting to have that done. But I could pretty much say that version six of Rock Mobile is almost done too. Oh. And that is a parallel effort to get everything into MAUI, which is a new framework that Microsoft's releasing. It's very similar to the framework that we were on. So there's, for the most part, things just kind of work. There's a few things that don't. But it's really a framework of the future for Microsoft. It's a multi platform approach. They're pouring a lot of effort into really polishing it, working on bug releases and performance improvements. So it's exciting to be kind of in the middle of where Microsoft is pouring its efforts because you get to see things happening really fast. I said, if you have an older version of Rock Mobile, as you transition to this, there could be some small things that change, but Brayton on the team who's been doing all of that work has done a really great job of documenting it. And he's got a blog post that's going to go out when we're ready to publish this and a lot of transition information. So he's done a lot of work to make sure that when possible, we could just make it seamlessly work and when it can't work that way, how to get around it easily. But I would say that is kind of a whole new generation of Rock mobile. So yeah, don't think it's just going to be push the button, everything's going to be perfect. It could happen that way. if you have a very simple app, it probably will happen that way. But if you have some complex stuff, you might have to adjust some minor layout issues. But he addresses all that. So really cool stuff. I mean, a lot of that's just within the last two weeks. I feel things move here the speed of light. I think you're right. Another thing that many of us got to work on is just some more performance improvements. And it kind of drops into a topic of just how to keep your Rock instance stable, which I think is something that we probably want to talk about on the podcast. I don't think that's a one type of conversation. You get it done in five minutes. This is a eight hour, over two years type of topic. Because there's a couple of right ways to do things in Rock and there's an infinite number of wrong And it's not that people try to do it wrong, but it's just knowing what works and what doesn't. And in a sense, Rock's a little bit different in our product because we're giving you a toolset and you have to know how to use the tools. The cool thing with that is you can make new things that didn't exist, but the bad thing is that you're kind of responsible for how you built it. It's kind of if you add onto your house, you can't blame the home builder for anything you've added on. And so our responsibility is to help educate and not say, Well, here's the tool, good luck. That we provide instruction manual, but not only that, but there's classes or tips for home building. Because sometimes if we give you a drill, it's not that you used a drill wrong, but maybe the drill wasn't the right tool to use on that one. Maybe that one was supposed to be a hammer. And so we're constantly trying to provide more of those resources. But I would say one tip I would probably say, and this isn't really a technical tip, it's more of a strategy tip is, as technologists, we're always interested in new things, right? We want to learn new things, we see something being done a different way, whether it be a new JavaScript framework or a new backend or something. And sometimes there's a temptation when you need to build something in Rock that you want to bring in some of these different things. And, , I get that because I have those same struggles and temptations, but I would say if you're building something in Rock for Rock, do it the Rock way, not because it's better, but because it's more consistent. And that makes it better for the person who's going to come behind you, because there always will be something coming behind you. we're not eternal beings. Eventually we will retire or move or a life event happens that we have to step away from our current employment. And that's really important for the church. I always think about the senior pastor as I'm trying to make my solution. I hope they never have to know how it's written, but I want them to feel comfortable that this is the best way possible for them long term when they need to bring in either another partner or a partner or a new staff member that they can go out, that staff member could go out to the community and say, Oh, right, this is the way we do it. It aligns with the documentation versus the, Oh, well that was not bad, but it's so different and so radically that I would basically have to start over. Yeah. And so I think it's just trying to, in a sense, be self sacrificing that we might have to use our hobby time or our home time to play with some of those technologies and do it the most consistent way possible. Just a thought. I mean, there's lots of other things that obviously we could talk about from how to keep your Rock instance supportable. And we can bring more of those into future podcasts as well. Yeah, I think one of the struggles we're kind of realizing over the last few weeks is that there are a lot of these best practices that we talk about. We talk about them a lot. We haven't boiled them down or kept them in one place. And so when we see certain things , Oh, well, yeah, don't do it this way. And then inside my head, I'm , Oh, it would be really nice if that was all in one place. And that's probably going be possible to have one consistent place. I do think a lot of these best practices, many people in the community would say repeat them because they've heard them and they know them and they do them, but where's the one place that you can kind of go to gather all that? So we're trying to figure out how do we do that in the library kind of stuff that doesn't probably belong in the general manuals. Those are more on features and functionality, but in just general strategies. It's hard to have all of those possible strategies in your head without having tripped on some things to figure them out as you go. Right. And sometimes it's just even to be able to point back to it and say, Oh, hey, see point 12 of general configuration. Not only will it give you information of what is the best practice, but why is it a best practice? We always talk about having to understand the why. You can tell someone don't do that, but if they understand the why, it really cements it in. It maybe gives some examples of the right versus the wrong way. And it will never be comprehensive, but Oh, impossible. But a collection is is a great idea, and we'll continue to bring some things up as we think through them or run into them from time to time. So we always wanna do our best to share what we know and learn with the whole community because it's better for everyone to know and to approach things the same way. So we've been really busy over here, as you can tell. There's just a lot going on on so many different fronts. And we have a few end of year ish reminders for you as well. We're actually in the start of the second month of the fourth quarter. That means the holidays are here. Right? Second month of the fourth quarter. It's kinda scary. It is scary. I'm not really personally ready, but we also have to be ready at the work that we're doing. So don't forget the key things get your contribution statements tested now. That shouldn't come down to the wire. Take a look at your infrastructure and make sure your resourcing levels will be able to handle your Christmas influx in case some things have changed over time. So don't forget those things. Christmas is coming, and we want you all to be prepared. I'm sure there will be a lot of other initiatives passing down here very soon from leadership about how to treat this particular season. Have you selected Nick and I's Christmas presents yet? I can't tell you this publicly. Yeah. I'm not saying what it is, but have thought about it? We're talking white elephant gift. Oh, I'm just saying, you just said be prepared. I'm just saying. I've been thinking about this for the past twelve months. I literally do that. I keep a list of things that Intense. I think buying gifts is so fun. I don't really care about getting gifts, but It is so fun when you get just the right thing figured out for someone. Yeah. Or something super funny. Yes. Either of those is great. Yes. Oh, so many things we could say. Now we're gonna move on to the next topic on my list. Don't also forget the conference is coming, and you'll wanna get those tickets if possible on this year's budget. The price continues to go up the closer we get to the event because that's when our prices start to go up and we have to lock things in. So now is better than later. And the closer we get to the end of the year, the more you'll have on your plate. So just get those ticket purchases knocked out. And we've said it before, but we'll remind you again, it's okay if you have to change who's coming closer to the event. We can move names around later. So just purchase the number of tickets that you'll need. And don't forget those new tracks that we have for other teams this year on generosity, engagement, and communications. We know the Rock community has really benefited from the conference being able to collaborate, come together, share things. Some of the other teams that use Rock are a little more separated or distanced from from the Rock team, and they may not have had the benefit of collaborating with other churches in the same way or understood the vision and innovation of what's possible in their space with the Rock toolset. So we wanna help put that type of experience together for your staff who are in finance teams, for the generosity track, communications teams, and then connections, engagement, discipleship teams. They're gonna be have their own areas to connect and learn, and it will be an incredible time. We'll probably even have some unveiling things that we're launching that will be beneficial to certain teams at that time. So make sure that they're aware of this opportunity and have and have the ability to come and budget for that too. Plus the hotel's being renovated. Right? Yes. Gonna wanna see that. I know. When's that supposed be done? So we get a sneak peek in January. We should be able to get in and see what it looks . Okay. Yeah. Now I'm crossing my fingers that their construction schedules work out better than my latest home remodel schedule, which was quite behind. It would be hard to To top that one. Worse than that. Yeah. That was literally the worst. I think they do have events in January. So whether they have to work around the clock or not, they should have it in place. I'm looking forward to it. It looked some pretty cool ideas they had. Yeah, it definitely did, and I think it'll be fun to see what that looks with our conference in the middle of it. It'll look very nice. Yeah, was kind of wondering what they're doing with some of those strange chairs they had in the lobby. Oh, the super high back chairs. The bright red ones that looked thrones from, , Alice in Wonderland or something. Yeah. Yeah. Wonder if you'll get one of those for Christmas. Just have to say to everyone who listens, don't be surprised by anything that that happens. There's just too much creative energy flowing over here sometimes in certain areas. Okay. So let's also mention our funding update. So you've heard from us about the update in the commitment amount for next year, and you've heard why. But a few of the things you may not know, and we know from talking to churches, you're you're working with your budgeting teams and you're figuring it out. Our team is also trying to allocate how quickly we can approach next gen next year, what resourcing we need to hire, how we move through things. So we're in the planning phases too. As soon as when and how you'll be able to make those commitment adjustments, can you please go into your community portal site, update your commitment amount, and just put the start date in there? That start date is the key that you'll use to know to say, hey. , I I just talked with a church this week. Their their budget cycle starts April 1, so they have to adjust their start date to April 1. That's okay. All of that communication really helps us plan, and we're trying to plan for next year too. There's a lot that we'd to do, and we wanna know how much of that we'll be able to do. So please go in and make those updates as soon as possible and reach out to us with any questions that you might have. And finally, our classes for 2024 are up online. So if you're looking to send someone and you're talking to them maybe in an end of year sync up with your team, kind of how are things going? What are our goals for next year? Those classes are available for someone to register for now so they have them all set and ready to go to hit next year's goals. So we're trying to help you plan. Thank you for helping us plan. There is so much going on right now. I'm sure at your church as well as here at Rock. It's exciting to be able to share that with you. It's incredible that it's already this time of year, but it has been a great year, and we're looking forward to the next one. Thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get prod podcasts so that you can hear from us again in the future. We'll have more exciting updates. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.