Podcast Episode 119: Episode 92: What's Coming In v11?

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In this episode of Rock Cast, Jon, Emily and Nick will take a look at what is coming in v11.

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 episode of Rockcast, the podcast where we take you behind the scenes with Spark Development Network and let what's going on with Rock. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here, and we are going to give you a scoop on the latest and greatest at Rock. I think we always have to start with the latest version updates. So let's dive in. Nick, can you tell us about what's coming next? Yes. We just took ten three to beta. So any time within the next two weeks, it'll probably be going to real public release or general release. There are many, many fixes in there. I think I said 74 earlier, but it was 78. We added a few more fixes during alpha, and some of those fixes aren't bugs per se, they're ways people are using Rock were slightly interesting, and so we said, okay, yeah, if you use it that way, sort of an enhancement we could we could make to make it work. So some of those are enhancements. It's surprising how many of our, , issues that get reported are are really just that, , , let's use it this way. Woah. Woah. Didn't think about that. Okay. Sure. Right. And and often they'll say, I think it should work this. And, , it's an interesting idea. And sometimes we will say, yeah, that's that's good. And then sometimes, no, this is just an idea. It doesn't work that way. Go open it up onto the ideas board. Yeah. It's it's it's cool to see the creativity of how people want to use things that you didn't intend to work that way, but it's a good idea. Yeah. I always hate telling somebody to go to the ideas board because it's sort of just feels bad. I I just feel I'm letting them down. But I feel you're pretty nice about it. some of the things they are they were some more things should probably go to ideas, but you bring them in as , oh, yeah. We'll just we get it. We'll just fix it. Yeah. It's the s in me on the disc score. We the s in you. We also had, , 16 improvements to other parts of Rock, and then we added 13 kind of micro features. Some of them weren't so micro. One of them was the campaign connections or connection campaign that's now in Rock. It's no longer a plug in. And if if you had the plug in, it just automatically removes it behind the scenes and clears it out, so all's good there. And then the attendance or self attendance entry, which I guess goes really well, pairs well with CHOP church online platform. Mhmm. And we I think it'll have a lot of other use cases, but that's the primary one. Yeah. It's really interesting feature, and then it has some cool stuff to it. So that's ten three. And there may be a ten four, but at this point, we'll see. We just don't know. It's gonna it'll depend a little bit on what people find once they start using ten three in production. But again, it's mostly bug fixes, so it should be very, very, very stable. Wow. That's really a very long list for a dot release. Yeah. And and you're right. It has a lot of fixes, but there's a lot of new stuff in there too. It's it's it would be it'd probably be a major release by many systems. But Yeah. And I think it represents, , two plus two two to three months of just effort. And it obviously, during all that time, we've been working on v 11 features. And we were talking about that this morning, and it's , oh, yeah. That that's we've been working on that for a while, or that's been done for a while, but it's in the next version, which I think you're gonna tell us about. Yeah. So v 11 roadmap is getting sliced and diced up because of the coronavirus and some of the features that we need to get out immediately. So we've been working with several folks in the community who have helped to fund additional features for contactless check-in. These are huge features. These are not easy features. And Nick and I and the development team have been running and gunning, trying to get these in, some really, really amazing things. So you will have the ability to do mobile check-in. So from an attendee Wait. John, you gotta wait till the the roar dies down. The people are clapping and cheering. Amazing. Just gloss that one right over. So one one small thing. So that's a big thing, though, and there's a lot to that. It's not a simple thing. I know of at least one church who kind of put together a solution for that. This really polishes that all out, makes it much more friendly for the church and for the attendee. The way they were doing it was good, but it was a little bit you really had to know what you were doing. This is really gonna kinda dummy that down, so I think it's a really good extension to that. We've also added a lot more ways identify the person, so feel that's a little cleaner, how to identify the person, you can use your phone number to identify yourself, but we've taken some really big steps in there, some very fine nuance on making that secure, and so we've given a lot of block settings to allow you to adjust that, but we've shipped it with what we feel is the best practice on doing that. So there's a lot to that one feature. If you are excited about that, I will give you a heads up. You should make sure that your check-in theme that you want to use is going to be mobile friendly, down to a phone size. A lot of the ones we're shipping in Rock will be optimized for that, but if you're using a custom one, you're going to want to spend some time making sure it looks good on a on a cell phone. Otherwise, when that feature comes out, you're gonna be behind the eight ball trying to get that done. So if you plan on using it and you have a custom check-in theme Yeah. I mean, they could always go back to using this one of the new electric theme Yeah. For mobile. If you if you that. It's a nice theme. I I it. We're gonna talk about that that new theme too. Oh, they should also set up Twilio and SMS if they have it. True. Because that would be really beneficial. You will need that too. Yeah. So And right now mobile check-in works with iPads when that comes out. Right? Yeah. Okay. So now we're getting deeper into it. So the attendee experience will work on any phone. It's just a web mobile web, , interface. It will give you a QR code to if you wanna get your labels printed and you don't have your server on which most people don't, you probably realize that you can't do printing from the server to your printers because your server's in the cloud, there's firewalls that will prevent that. So to get around that printing issue, we have updated the iPad check-in app to be able to scan the QR code from the attendees' phone and print their labels for them right there. So yeah, if you want to do the printing, which you probably do, and your server's not on-site, which is probably not, you will need to update your iPad app, and it's been enhanced to be able to scan those QR codes and print the tags right there. I've had questions from a lot of churches wondering, what do I do to make sure I'm ready when this comes out? So Two things. A couple things. Well, a couple things. Twilio account, get your check-in theme mobile that you want to use. And then, , you probably want to make sure you have a couple iPads that people are going be holding that are going to scan the person's phone and make sure that that's, , set to a kiosk that can print those labels for you. Think of them as, , printer stations. Check printer kiosk stations. Yep. And this is just the beginning. So we have other features coming that won't be an 11. It'd be an 11 dot something, where we're going to actually add on to that to add the ability to have three states of check-in. So right now, there's basically one state with an optional second. So right now, you're definitely checked in. That's the one everybody gets. , it makes sense, right? Check-in, checks in. You can optionally turn on check out if you'd . Some people do that. We're going add a third state, which is present. So check-in will be , yeah, I checked in from the parking lot. Present means I'm in the room now. So we're going to majorly update the check-in manager to allow someone to stand at the door and say, Oh, yeah, there you are. You're present. And so they'll mark you present. And then eventually, if you'd , you could get checked out. So you'll have three states. For now, that mobile check-in, when you check-in the parking lot, you're checked in and you're taking that seat in the room. And it's important that check-in does take that seat because we have to respect capacities of rooms and So when someone checks in from the parking lot, they are going to take a capacity, which we feel that's the right thing because you don't want to get to the room and go, oh, yes, sorry. Ran out of room. You didn't walk fast enough. I feel that would be a bad user experience. So and you can cancel them too, oh, this person checked in twenty minutes ago, and they are not present yet. Well, okay. They probably something happened. And you can disable that and get that that seed back if you want. So there's a lot of changes coming to check-in, and and I think even that's just another step. We have more and more steps we wanna add. We're we're finding some ways that we wanna enhance the check-in to make it more efficient. , sometimes you get under the covers and you're , oh, yeah. Oh, we need to polish that thing too sometime. So we have a lot of dreams. Just not a lot time. Okay. So we better get moving because we have a lot of other features to talk about with 11. Contactless checking, we can cross that one off the list. So one of the highest asked for features in our idea board is SendGrid. They want that in Core. So obviously, is a plug in today. It uses the SendGrid SMTP kind of API to get those out, and people have been clamoring for an updated one, especially since Twilio bought SendGrid, there's a lot of renewed interest, which makes sense. So in Core, there will be a SendGrid HTTP transport for communications. So, , chuck that idea off. So glad that we have that idea board, that people are submitting the ideas and voting on it. When you vote, it matters. We're looking at that. We're really happy about that. Also, there's going to be two new storage providers. In Rock, there's two ways that you can put files in other places. One is a file trans kind of transport file provider, and then there's a storage provider that uses the storage features. There's two new ones, one for Azure storage and one for Google Cloud storage. So that's kind of exciting. That's great. Content channels have been getting a little bit of polished. They're one of our biggest features, so we continue to polish them. Some of those features come to , hey, we use this tool too, and sometimes it's we have so many content channels now, it's a little frustrating to navigate that, so we've added categories to content channels. So now you can categorize your content channels, and it really helps kind of simplify the selection of them. It's it's really quite nice when you start getting a lot of them. We also added another feature to content channels. You're probably familiar today, your your main content of a content channel item is HTML, and there's a couple ways you can provide that HTML. We're providing a new a new type of content. We call it structured content. So in the past, HTML has been great. People that rich editor. But if if you're paying attention to some of the more advanced things that people doing now, they're they're coming out with these editors that are much more structured. So the the thing behind the scenes is actually JSON, this, , techy little thing, and it's really describing that content in a very structured way. HTML is very unstructured. It says it's a kind of structured, but it's really not. It's you can do all kinds of weird stuff in there. Structured content is is much more precise. So a paragraph is a paragraph. And you can turn that into HTML, so you can convert that into HTML very easily. But because it's structured, you can do more things with it, more rich things. And so we've added that structured content as a feature. It's really kind of an advanced feature, so we tend to polish that and continue to make that better. We really added it for some features we needed for Rock Mobile. So that is something we're still working on, and it's amazing the amount of effort that that's taking, and it's adding so many more features into Rock. And so I feel when that arrives on the scene, there's gonna be so much, , oh, wow. That was not easy. Another cool feature that we've been working with is, I think if you've been listening to the podcast and watching some of the architecture videos, we've been spending a lot of time making sure performance is really a first rate feature. And so because of that, we're trying to give people more and more tips of where there's issues and how to address that. One of the ones we've done is we'll show you now what what the median page load time is for each page in Rock. Now it's gonna take some time to build that data after you install 11. We'll need to get some pages loaded after eleven, and then it'll start showing you how long each page is taking to load, and that kind of helps you refine your search for which pages to work on. You'll also note that the bottom graph of how fast pages are loading, you can click on the link that says how fast that page loaded if you're logged in as administrator, and it's going to show you this waterfall chart of every block and which block took the longest. Wow. It's kind of always been in Rock, it's kind of hidden. Most people do not know it's there. And if you do know it's there, it's kind of ugly. The new one is really, really, it's awesome. So that'll really kind of help you. Once you see which page is slow, go to that page, click that button, you'll see which block is slow. Now you're drilling down to choosing LB to debug some of that. Small thing, workflow communications, send communications, you can now provide a CC and a BCC, another idea that was highly rated. Small thing, but I think it's going be a big thing over the long term, is the theme editor for your themes can in the past, you could always have a color picker and a text editor or number entry. You can now do an image picker. So now your themes can dynamically change their images super easy without knowing any kind of CSS or less. That's going to be really cool. That was put in place to support another feature, which is a new check-in theme. There's two new check-in themes. One Nick mentioned is called Electric. It's called Electric. The backstory is it looks a little bit a Tesla interface, very, very, very clean. And it has two states, a light mode and a dark mode. And there's another theme, though, called Arrow. Arrow is wow, it's it's a toolbox theme. The the theme editor for that allows you to change all kinds of colors and the images, so you can really easily change the images. And that's we wanted to be able to do that and make sure it was kind of the theme. It's the Swiss Army knife, but without being able to change the images easily, it really wasn't that friendly. So we created the ability to change images for that. You can also merge businesses now. Wow. People have been wanting that. Let's see. Check-in has sound effects. They're very light and subtle, but as you you tap, it makes little sound effects. And you can change those, you just have to swap out the MP3s. I will say though, , you can't understand how hard it is to find open source royalty free UX sounds. That sound good. Yeah. That sound good. Yeah. There's plenty of that sound terrible. So it was really hard to find, and and you can go to these sites, there's some just amazing ones, and for the low price of, , literally $12, you can buy them, but you can't put them in an open source project. And I feel that's one thing that is a real handicap for what we do. Everything we do, , there's controls you can buy that do amazing things. We can't use any of that because it's not open sourced. So I really feel it's we're handcuffed with a heavy backpack, and we're thrown overboard and said swim, because everything has to be open sourced to our license. But imagine if the rest of the church, , did their what they do and they love as an open source thing, , then we could all share amongst each That's Yeah. I think God's plan. Yeah. It's probably twice as hard, but the benefits are, , infinitely huge. But when you're the person who has to do it, it's , woah, why would I I'm just going go buy that. It's $12, ? But if we go and spend an extra mini hours, then everybody gets to use it and doesn't have to go get a license and such. Now we had a great feature. It was called the SMS pipeline. It's amazing feature, actually. And unfortunately, the way it goes in the Rock world, people love the feature, and then they love it too much, and then they want it and then they want more and more and more. So someone said, hey, why why can't I have multiple SMS pipelines? And it's one of those thoughts that you're , oh, right. Didn't expect it to be loved so much. And so it it didn't make sense to have multiple, honestly, in the beginning. But now that we see the use cases and people are just going nuts for it Yeah. Some of them It makes sense. Became so complicated because they were trying to do everything in one pipeline to account for every situation. Right. Yikes. Yeah. So it's great. Love it. Didn't see that one coming, but now that now that we see the reaction and the response, it does it makes a lot of sense. So we refactored that so you can have multiple SMS pipelines. Of course, each SMS number can only be limited to a single pipeline, but some people have a lot of numbers and just all those numbers sharing one pipeline was a little hard to visualize and administrate. Worked fine, but it's just hard to administrate. So great idea. Here's one that is really cool, and it's going to take, I think, the community a bit to understand all the uses. And then I expect it to be, again, the one above it, politely abused because it's so powerful, correctly abused, is that at the bottom of every grid, there's a new button that if you click that button, it allows you to launch a workflow for each item in the grid. That's going to take you to a page and make sure which workflow do you want, and here's all the things that are going to run. You kind of get a chance to make sure that's exactly what you wanted to do. But at the bottom of the grid, you just basically click that button, it'll show you which workflow do you want to run, and it'll pass each of those items as an entity to your workflow. So you basically have this ability to just do crazy amounts of cool stuff. Now that's kind of cool, but also on the grid, you can add your own buttons to lock that in to say, hey, when I click this button, I mean run that workflow, and here's the icon I want to use for it. It'll still show you, okay, this is about to happen, so you get a chance to visually inspect it. But the workflow that you pick, it won't be a choice. It'll automatically be selected for you, which is really cool. On top of that, you don't even have to send it to that page. You could really say, hey, when you click this button, send it to my custom page, passing me an entity set of all those things in the grid, I'm going to go choose what to go do with that, which is more for the developers. But without being a developer, you can wire that all up to launch work workflows. Now, be careful, you with great power comes great responsibility. gosh. A 30,000 person list and clicking a bad Oh. Oh, boy. Yeah. And there's going be an architecture video on workflows, and it's going to offend some because it's going to tell the reality that, We've seen that happen. Workflows are awesome. We love them. But wow, don't abuse them. They can totally get used in the wrong way, and that's not a good thing. I continue to see workflows being used to create applications, and that's not necessarily a good thing. That's a house of cards. So, but it's cool to have the option, and it's, and when used correctly, I think it's gonna be pretty amazing. With great power comes great responsibility. Yes, so just go easy. And I'm sure we'll be adding, , again, Nick said, we'll be getting some bug reports because it's , well, that wasn't intended, but that's a good idea. So yeah, we'll add that in too. But it's a cool one. Okay, so another one back to performance. Performance is key, but also we want to track what things are being used so you can keep your environment clean. Data views. Another great feature that often gets a little bit of abuse because we don't create them in a very organized strategic way, we end up with a lot of them. We do get the same on our own site. I have many data views that weren't strategically made, now I'm looking at them going, Do I really need this? So we've added the ability to track how often a data view is being used. Now it's a count, and we store two things. How many times has this data view been run, since which date? And we also add how long did it take to run. So now inside there, can see when you look at a data view, you can see how many times it's been run since a certain date. You can reset that date and count, say, okay, well, , I'm not sure if it's still being used, though, so reset it, and that will be since today, you'll see, okay, the future, how many, and then you can see how long it takes. So you can say, oh, well, this data view's not very fast, so maybe I should persist it, or maybe I should kind of refactor it. There's some ways now you can refactor your data views and make them a little faster. But now you have all that telemetry data about data views. So hopefully it allows you to clean up a lot of the ones that aren't being used. I would kind of put a little bit of a star next to it. It's very hard to know when these data views are being used because sometimes a data view is a child of another one. We've got that one working, so that was a little tricky. So we now know that. But there's some other edge cases where data views are used in some weird ways that we're going back and finding all these edge cases and adding to it. So you need to be a little bit careful in 11. That number might say zero when it's actually kind of being used in edge cases, but we're finding those and addressing them. I think we really got 97.3% of the cases picked, but there's that last, , little bit that we still need to get. Yeah. It is pretty rare that somebody would use a data view inside of a content channel filter, but you can. Yeah. And we're finding that one specific one. You brought you brought that one up, and we were gonna get that one. But for the most part, it really shows you which ones are often highly used. And I think the original intent was , wow, this one's used all the time and it's slow. Well, that's the one you want to start addressing. Okay, this is a small one, but I think it's going be powerful over time. So we all know and love campuses. Many churches have multiples, but even if you only have one, there's a new feature. Every campus now has a group tied to it, and it's called it's a group of type campus team. So that allows you to really start describing roles within the campus. So you can start adding individuals to that campus team, and you can create all kinds of great crazy roles. , it might be youth pastor. And now it allows you to really start building out the roles within a campus. And right now, it's just there for you to see and describe and maybe use on the website, but over time, we're gonna start to put more and more features around that. Some of this kind of concept is, I think it's globally needed, but it was interesting as we were working with the Archdiocese of Detroit, they were talking about how they were trying to maybe consider making one big instance for all of the churches within their area, so each church would be a campus. And some of the things that we were thinking about as we were trying to brainstorm that with them and consult with them on that is, well, how do who's this and that? And this campus team concept came out. But again, I think it's just going to be really huge in the future. Another teeny tiny one, but I really this one. So how many times have you had a defined value list, a defined type with all these values, and you use a defined value picker someplace, and you're , Gosh, I need to add another value before I can pick it. So you have to go back and have administrative rights to go do it. So now within the divine value picker, you can actually add a new defined value if you have rights to. Wow. Yeah. That's going be kind of a nice one. What a time saver. Yeah. That one actually came from some, again, consulting with the archdiocese of Detroit. They were going to have a defined value that had all of the Catholic churches in The United States. And so, obviously, they're going be adding a lot of those over time. And so, I was , gosh, we should just add the picker. It turns out they're not gonna probably do that. They're probably gonna use locations. But since the idea was there, I'm , gosh, I think that's a really great idea to have just in general. So we went ahead and and added it from a core perspective. But don't turn it on. Don't make it happen everywhere because you're bound to have people abusing that and Yeah. Adding junk data into your defined values. Yeah. And remember, defined values are cached, so they they take up memory. So you don't wanna have tens of thousands of them unless those tens of thousands are very, very needed. Okay, one more. Cache headers? Yes. I've waiting for that You guessed it. So this goes back again to performance. Again, if you've been following the podcast, we've been talking about how we've been working with churches, especially during COVID-nineteen situation, trying to make sure that their sites are scaling well. And a lot of things that we're seeing is, wow, caching is really, really important, but sometimes we need other levels of cache. The architecture video goes into talking about CDNs, and CDNs are so powerful in terms of taking load off your server. So we've spent a ton of time internally looking at all the different caching services that are out there, trying to understand that market. And it's a little bit of a confusing market because there's various types of CDNs, and there's I find that it's interesting that there's really no terminology around these types. They just all work one of two ways, but no one really talks, lumps them into two categories. So we've done a lot of learning, done a lot of research, we've done a lot of prototyping, and I think we're really close to having a really cool solution. But one of the things that we noted is that it's really important that your application is able to talk to the CDN and describe to the CDN what should and should not be cached. If you just kind of flip the switch, which a lot of people unfortunately do, the CDN is making these guesses about what it should cache, and many times that's inappropriate. You don't want to cache that thing, but you do want to cache this. Also, some of the clients that we're looking at, in looking at some of their traffic, we found a couple where they had other applications out there, and those applications are making API requests constantly, thousands of times an hour, asking for the same data over and over and over. Which equated to three fourths of all of their traffic. Yeah. Wow. Now, technically, app that application that's making those API requests should be caching that. That's the best thing to do. , the the application should know, hey, I have this. I don't need to ask for it again, and have its own internal cache. But barring that, a CDN could block, it could be a shield for all that and say, hey, I've seen that request. I know from, , Rock's told me that I should cache this for it for a certain amount of time. The problem is we didn't have a way of an administrator inside of Rock describing that. Hey, I know this API is going to be used and constantly be queried, so please cache this query for this amount of time. And so we've added that. So now you can go into your REST APIs and go down to the action level and say, hey, this action, please put a cache tag on it so that the CDN can read that and go, oh, okay, this one's appropriate for me to cache, and the rest of them aren't. Super, super powerful, and I think it's going to really offload a lot of weight off Rock, so that the Rock server is spending more of its time just doing the things only it can do, and offloading a lot of the cheap, easy stuff to the CDN, which should allow you to do more with what you have paid into your hosting bill, or even bring down your hosting bill a little bit. You might be able to ratchet down your Rock spend on hosting because the CDN's offloading that traffic. So I did mention the caching of the REST headers. We also added some additional abilities to put cache tags on the binary files that you have in inside a Rock. There is a switch today. It's been there forever that says cache this, but if you look at the code and and see what it's doing, it's it's really doing two things. It's caching it to your server's local file system, and then it's adding a cache tag that's , For one year, just cache this. And that would be inappropriate to tell the CDN to cache it for a year because that's just too long, and you really need to have finer control of that. So we've added that ability. So a lot of stuff in 11, there's some really cool features you're going to use today, but it's also building out the foundation to make your digital strategy scale better. And there'll be a lot more training and guidance coming. And some of it, honestly, may require some consulting, depending on your technical level. But I think that goes back to a topic we need to keep talking about. We keep putting up more and more content we promised on the architecture side. That was one of the promises we made last year, that we need to partner with performance, that you, as the administrator, need to do it right, but we need to do a better job of telling you how to do it right. So we've invested in those videos. More more are coming. But there's a certain level that you just have to understand some of these engineering topics. They're not hard. You can get into that and learn it, but also I think some of them you might say, Well, I want to specialize in more on the ministry side, and that might mean that you need to do some more consulting to get those implemented. That makes sense. Wow. Sorry. That was a long time. Dev team has been very busy. Yeah. And this is just the stuff that's ready. Just know that there's a ton of stuff back there that is still being worked on for either Rock Mobile or and some of these caching, a lot of this stuff is some of it's for for Rock Mobile too, , to help with that. But there's still so much more under the water line that is coming that is huge. And a lot of bigger topics too that we're looking at that You have V12, V13. Yeah. And even some radical new architecture that we need to keep up with that are more generational in terms of Rock. We don't think about that. Can we say Rock two point o? Yeah, what you just did. I think you did. That's essentially what we're looking And we spend a lot of time talking about it and reading, reviewing, prototyping new things to make sure. We just can't talk too much about that because we can't sometimes when we talk about things, it becomes promise that we can't Right. We don't want to say we're looking at technology x, and everybody says, oh, I thought you were looking I thought we were going technology x. No, we were just prototyping that. You have to do the due diligence. Know what's out there. Know what's going to work. Find out huge decision. Yes. Absolutely. Last. Right. And it goes back to our strategy with, , ready, aim, fire. It sounds so obvious. No one does that. , if you look out into the world, we will all, by human nature, want to fire, fire, fire, fire. Mhmm. And occasionally, we'll fire, aim, and then be ready. And then fire again. Yeah. It's just fun, right? But with these big technology projects and hundreds of servers all configured differently, we can't do that. We would break you guys all sorts of days. So we have to be ready, aim fire. And there's a great quote from Patton that I saw this week, A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood. And that's so true in what we do. If we just spend a little bit more time on the sweat, we will save so much blood on ourselves and on, honestly, each one of you. Yeah, a gallon of blood will kill you if you lose that, so it's worth the sweat. Yeah, sweat's not fun, but it's better than the blood. So we are working really hard on much bigger and longer things too. Right. And a lot of these were in of what you just listed here today on both ten point three and eleven were also in response to all of the COVID situations happening. And we saw performance hits as people's traffic went up on their sites, and we saw all these spikes, and we definitely wanna be responsive to all of that. But there there are a lot of plates spinning here in the development world. Yeah. Even that CDM project, we thought, oh, okay, three or four days, we'll get some research into this. We spent weeks going, wait, how is that not working? And wait, this vendor says this should work, and trying to dig through all of that. And it's somewhat rewarding because we know by doing it, then we're saving hundreds of other organizations from having to figure it out because we'll figure out the pattern and then get that out much easier to many, many other organizations. But holy cow, I didn't think that was going to take that long, but it needed to. It's funny how every project topic seems to lead into all these little subcategories and sub alleyways. You kinda have to go down and see which ones lead to the main road, and just time leads to time. Yeah. And it can be a little frustrating too because we have visions of where we wanna go, and it takes so long to get there. , all these things we went through None of it's easy. Right. Some of them we've been talking about for a couple years, and none of them , the structured editor, I can't tell you how many refactors we had and polishes that had to go through till it's where it's at, and we're not even perfectly happy where it's at, but we know it's on the right track. And I can't tell you how many pre alpha releases where I okay. I think we got this. Dang. What about that? Or what why does it, , encode it that way? , that's ridiculous. Okay. Well, we'll get it for the next pre alpha release. And literally, , just the one the pre alpha release we did this week, I was checking the final stuff on. I'm , okay. It's finally working the way he wants it working. And that's just one of 55 plates that are Unbelievable. Yeah. It's and you want so much more because there's so many other ideas that we have that would be so cool, and we're chipping at them. But Workflow two point o. Yeah. Yeah. We haven't talked about that, so don't get your hopes up. The good news is we will never run out of great ideas between what's generated here and what's generated in the community. I don't see us as ever having a lack of ideas. Yeah. That won't probably be That won't be our our situation. Resources are probably the biggest limitation. It's it's yeah. And it's the right resource. It's really time and resources. And the right people. I mean, I was talking to someone just yesterday. They're , , just get just get more people. And it's , you you can't just get more technical people. , we try. , we literally are always looking Yep. And trying to find people in different places. We've gotten a number of great people on our team. Our team is great. Right. Yes, it is. But you can't just go out and find more of them. Right. Those are very, very hard to find. You'd be surprised at the funny, weird things we do to find people. I'll tell this story. This story is not finished. I probably shouldn't tell Oh, dear. What is this story? That's cool. So, I'm working on Rock Mobile one weekend, and I'm looking up trying to figure out how to do a certain thing, and I find a Stack Overflow article kind of on it. And I'm , oh, yeah, this is this is close to what I need. And then I look at it, and the the the example he puts up, this person was a Christian, , web app, and it looks nice. I'm , I wonder what this young guy is. But you can't get ahold of someone on Stack Overflow, , unless they Your identity is pretty much hidden. Yeah. And and theirs was set to, , be kinda hidden. And I'm , I don't know how to get ahold of this guy. I literally spent, , an hour, , researching. How do I ping this person? so the what I did is I made a workflow entry form on our on our Rock website that says, please contact me, and I put it as a comment, and this post was two years old, saying, hey, I'd to talk to you sometime about kingdom minded technology. Here's a link, and so you could put your contact information in. Contacted me, so I'm hoping to reach out to him via phone. We've talked back and forth via email, but I hope to reach out to him by phone today. Did you delete that comment yet? No. I was thinking about that last night. I need to delete that. I'm gonna get all sorts of weird stuff in that thing. Downvotes. Right. We downvote you for putting Well, technically, you're not allowed to do that, and I was , well, I might lose some reputation points over this, but it's probably worth it. Detective John. Well, that's the levels that we're all going to. , talk you and I talk all the time. , do we get our eyeballs to what we're doing? Because we feel if people knew about this, they'd all , many Christian technologists would wanna be a part of it. Oh, for sure. And we have not yet found that magical Rock developer factory where you can go pick one off the line and just conveniently add them right into what you're doing. Yeah. And I just encourage you guys. I know you guys have some of the same problems that many of you have or could have the ability to have more resources, but you can't find them. We hear that all the time, and you just have to be creative. Yep. That's a challenge. I don't think it's one gets easier. You can try all sorts of creative things. You learn about yourself in the process. You learn about your organization, about other people. It's pretty interesting, but I think it's probably always gonna be a challenge and a limitation. Yeah. God does provide though. Mean, we've some amazing people, especially on the professional services side recently too, that just, they may not know Rock, but we train them that, and they learn it quickly, and they're just, We have some great teammates. It's pretty exciting. Right. And then influencing them with our culture of Ready, Aim, Fire and the right way. And, , Nick and I spent a lot of time too just helping trying to say, oh, that's the way, but this way might be a little bit better. And we learned from that too. Yes. And I think it's exciting that we're building this foundation of knowledge and best practices here that everybody can tap into. So no matter whether it's a developer writing code in one area or someone on the professional services team working with one client, we're creating this consistent experience and consistent quality across the board. And that's a that's a real challenge, but we're we're seeing that take root, and that's really exciting. Yeah. And it's cool to see some people on the team get excited by that and really help with that. Luke on our team is really good at taking all the nuggets that get thrown about in meetings and putting them in writing so that they're reusable to others, and that's just a huge benefit. Because you can have those nuggets, but if don't write them down, then they're not that helpful. Right, and it's a really collaborative process. So if someone's not personally interested in making things better and in learning and growing, then they're not going to likely naturally start helping out in that collaborative process. So it really goes to show when it's working, you've got a team of really minded people who are working hard to personally grow. Right. So one more quick topic. I know this has turned into a long podcast, but VRX, it's coming. It's the same dates that we were going to do RX twenty twenty. We've talked about it on one podcast. If you missed it, here's the scoop. RX went virtual this year. So many other events right now, with the current COVID nineteen situation, live events with hundreds of people don't seem a good idea, and in many cases aren't allowed. So virtual. We are going to have pretty much the same lineup of speakers we already had. We've connected with everyone. We've even had a few extra come in that weren't going to be able to be speakers. We have even more sponsors than we had before. We have pretty much everyone that was registered for Rx twenty twenty has now registered their organization for VRX. A couple people are still in conversations trying to figure out a couple logistical things, but we've pretty much moved the entire existing event over into this virtual event. And it's something we've been excited about doing in theory and concept actually long before coronavirus tossed twenty twenty in the air. So we have had some research behind it. We're very excited. There will be live segments. There will be on demand segments. Everything will be available to your whole organization with one registration. So if you have not signed up yet, you don't have to book travel this year. You don't have to have the same types of financial commitment this year. If you haven't been to a conference before, this is your year. We don't know what next year's gonna look , but make sure you sign up for VRX twenty twenty so that you can see a piece of the Rock community that right now you aren't aware of how it works. I mean, there's just something about the Rock community that you only experience in a conference setting. So make sure you sign up. And if you're, in Canada, if you're in The UK, if you're in Australia, New Zealand, or another part of the world and you haven't had access to a conference before, this is an incredible opportunity. And because things will be available on demand, even if you're not capable of or don't want to be up at, two in the morning watching the live segment, you'll be able to get that on demand later. So make this your opportunity to to be a part of this community event, and I think it's actually going to add quite a bit of opportunity into the community that otherwise wouldn't be there. Yeah. It's definitely an interesting concept. And it's a concept we'd actually talked about even before this. Were thinking about doing a half time year to do a VRX. So it was nice to be able to dust that off, the concepts. We still have a lot of work to do in terms of figuring out how this is all going to work. Right, there are definitely things to still figure out, but it's gonna be an exciting event. There's a lot of good stuff behind it. So the things you're looking for, the great content, the great connections, the great all the things that you look for to power your Rock experience next year, they're there. That's they're built into the VRX 2020, and now more people are gonna have access to it. And don't forget to book with your leadership the time off to take in that content. If you put that on your calendar and block it, it's not gonna good intention, but it's probably not gonna happen. I know that that's the case with me. Mhmm. Pretend you're not in the office. Go ahead and set your out of office. Go grab your team who needs to participate in this and find a deserted conference room somewhere or go on your individual Zooms, but block the time. Mhmm. Alright. Well, that was a very long, very informative podcast today, and I hope that people are able to take away what they need to hear and just realize we're we try to be really responsive. We try to keep up with what's going on with what's needed, set new vision, and move forward on that, but also be very responsive to what's going on. And and I hope the community has been able to see that through this whole coronavirus scenario. Alright. Thanks for joining us today, and, we'll chat next time. 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.