Podcast Episode 59: Episode 33: Rock 7.3 and New RX2018 Tracks

Description

In our latest episode of RockCast, we're going to bring you up to speed on version 7 of Rock (spoiler: it's out!) and bring you some late-breaking news on some of the new RX2018 tracks. We'll also give you a preview of some of the exciting work that the Sparkability Group has been working on

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 today's episode of Rockcast. Thank you so much for joining our team today. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston, Nick Airdo, and David Turner today. We're gonna give you a little update on what's been going on here, with Rock and with Spark Development Network. John, why don't you kick things off with our current version? Yes. So, seven o's out and we have seven at this point. Seven two is, the most recent, but seven three is fast approaching and coming. So it's in the alpha stage right now, and we're gonna be pushing that for a fast release. There are a few bugs that are, specifically important that we're trying to address with that. And I would say seven three, wow. What a wild ride. That was a riding a bull. And luckily, I wasn't the one riding the bull. It was Mike Peterson. I was just a guy trying to say, hey, Mike, over there. There's another one. So big thanks to him for just jumping in there, and I can't think of how many times we repackaged it because there's always another one and another one and another one and another one. And so I think that's kinda what you see when we have these humongous releases, seven o was basically almost actually, a little bit more than a year's worth of work. And so, therefore, you have a year's worth of, changes and tweaks. And we did some really challenging things about moving data around, and and, I think what we learned is we don't wanna do big, big, huge releases that. So that was kind of a crazy two weeks trying to get all that organized and project managed and fixed and then repackaged and packaged and packaged. But I think it's there. , we hope to release that early next week. So, we'll get that out. And then we're already working on seven four. We already have several fixes in seven four also. Seven four, at this point, will probably not be, such a critical release, so it'll be a little bit longer, our normal release cycle would be for a a patch release. But there's already definitely several things already fixed in that and lots of things slated for 07/04. Should we give a shout out to our volunteer alpha and beta testing teams? They've been on a wild ride too. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And I think that's we keep learning. I think one of the things that we need to keep doing is more and more testing in alpha and beta. What we found in seven three is that a lot of those things, , hopefully could have been found in alpha and beta. And so now we have a checklist that we're kinda gonna be modifying. So one of the things that we found is that we're where all of us are doing the testing is logged in as administrator, which makes sense because we're all administrators. But a lot of the bugs were found because normal staff, obviously, don't have certain rights, and those are kinda hidden by the fact that we all test as administrators. So Well, this is the good stuff. It's when we can find those little things and and tweak our lists and things. So our our team's been the alpha and beta team have been really instrumental in helping us uncover some of those things and then walking through our new new processes and things to test. It's it's a big deal. We couldn't do this without those teams. So Right. And I always say, it's not a mistake unless you make it twice. So Right. Right. As as we're learning, we're just updating the lists, and and we get better every time. That's it. Off we go. Alright. So that's where we are currently with Rock. David, could you catch us up on our consulting update for the team? Sure. We've been busy as usual. Probably the biggest thing we've been doing is a new block for family preregistration that can exist on your website or even on, a kiosk for people who are new families to enter information. And that's something the crossing has wanted. Price Fellowship and NewSpring have also added some input to that. So it should be pretty full featured. Another thing we're looking at is our caching and refactoring that a little bit to, be faster and take advantage of some of the, distributed caching solutions out there Redis or Memcached. So that's something we're working on and looking at. Still kind of proof of concept right now. And then there's some other small blocks that aren't in core that we've done for Champion Forest and Willow Creek. Cool. Well, our events management team, is now working on the conference. That's actually really tongue in cheek because any of our teams are just same people, different hats. I was wondering, who are they? Have Why why have I been working so hard and where have they been? So when we all wear the event planning hats, we've been working on the conference coming up next August and we're still in that early bird ticket purchase phase, so we definitely encourage you if you're planning on coming and bringing people, get your tickets purchased now. It's $3.49. The the page is rockrms.com/rx20eighteen. This is a good time to buy your tickets. We are going to be posting some more information about our tracks and speakers coming up within the next few weeks. And at that time, we'll probably be increasing to our regular price for the conference. So if it's something you already know you're going to do, go ahead and get in on your ticket purchase now while you can at the best pricing. And speaking of tracks, we took all your feedback actually I was just reading through the surveys from last conference again yesterday, it was really interesting. So it's funny every year there's kind of a trend in what people are saying about what they'd to see the next year. And we usually come away with the same awareness of how we need to change the event as well. And we noticed this year we need to be able to specify and add some tracks. They may be a full track, it might be a half track, but the ability to specialize a little bit as our community has grown. So we're building those in right now and want to make you aware of that as you're looking for your budget approval and purchasing tickets. We're going to be having tracks or partial tracks for a lot of really interesting topics that include data, leadership, some things on finance, some involvement, communications and web, probably some things in a partial track for some development, and then of course all of the great best practices and recipes from churches that are using Rock. So this is something that not only do you not wanna miss if you've been there before, but this is a good time to be bringing the other people on your team that interact with Rock or that could benefit from having technology really power their ministry. So do consider that as you're as you're looking to purchase those early bird tickets. And we're also having a pre conference track that will be Sunday afternoon. So Sunday afternoon, if you are, new to Rock, you can come and there will be a session kind of a what we do at the road show, maybe a little more in-depth. Although some of the road shows can go pretty long with the q and a. So but imagine a whole afternoon of sessions on just getting familiar with Rock. And then at the same time, we will also have something going on for the Rock stars and the conference sponsors. So if you were a 2017 Rock star or is this for the 2018 Rock stars? This will be for 2018. Okay. So they'll get an invite. They will. Okay. So forget what I said. If you were a 2017 Rock star, you may not be a 28 teen Rock star unless you really swung hard this past year. Keep applying yourself. And and then of course the sponsors that are help fund the event. Right. So I think it all boils down to don't book your tickets just yet. We'll get you a little bit more information. When it comes to your travel, do go ahead and grab those conference tickets. But as far as booking your travel, give us just a couple of weeks and we'll get some more information out. But, conference sponsors, we to have you set up the day before and we'll have a little meet and greet for you. So definitely plan on arriving and that'll be on Sunday. And then we'll have a Rock star community collaboration before on Sunday as well. And the the new to Rock that Nick is referring to is is really a great time for people to ask those questions and figure out, hey, how would I make the move? What does Rock look ? Would it work for us? And we had that built into our conference last year, but we're splitting it out and putting it in the day before. It's a it's totally free session. You can go to that and not go to the conference, but we know there are a lot of people that come to the conference to explore Rock, and it's a great way to kick it off the afternoon before and just get those questions answered so you're ready to move on and listen to what else is coming. And depending on timing, maybe the Rock stars will fold back into that at the end and Oh, that would be cool. They can partner up with some Rock stars and get even more questions answered. Right. And there will definitely be time to connect with Rock stars at the conference. Sure. We're having as usual, all those community collaboration that you're used to and time to connect with people from other churches will all be built in. We know that's one of the most powerful aspects of Rock and so that that's definitely always going to be, something that's, right in the middle the central part of our conference planning. Now if you already registered and there wasn't a question on there that said, do you wanna attend the new to Rock session, just realize we'll have an an additional registration for that. It's gonna be free. Right. But if for some reason you registered for the whole event, we'd still love for you to tell us you wanna come to the new to Rock session. We can ask. We have a we have the registration sent now, so we'll make sure and get that wrapped up. Okay. I think that's all we had to talk about today. Did we mention the the third day that might have some training Right. So we've had some requests and we may have we may be building in a day after the conference, so do hold off on those ticket purchases again for the airfare. But there may be a time to go and do some deep dives into a few advanced topics that people are really looking for so we're looking at how we could build that out right now. So heads up on that as well. Yep. Awesome. Alright. Great. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Rockcast. Have a great day. 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.