Podcast Episode 56: Episode 30: Where’s v7?

Description

Merry Christmas! v7 is in Alpha, FontAwesome 5 is in v7 and more.

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. Today, there are three of us here. We have Jon Edmiston, David Turner, and myself, Emily Forman. And we have some great updates for you here as we are rounding out 2017. Now, the big question that everyone's been asking for a long time is where's v seven? And we have a great update that you've all been waiting for. So David, why don't you tell us about that? Sure. Well, packaged v7 for Alpha about a couple weeks ago, two or three weeks ago. And people have been testing it. And we have found some things. So we actually just repackaged it again yesterday. And our goal is that that goes into beta. And so beta, we're targeting for the January 3. As long as everything goes well and we don't find any more issues with that. And just along with that, I just wanna give a shout out to Mike Peterson. He's the one that's been packaging that. He's had to do it a few times. So, he's just done a great job with that. Yep. He sure has. Big thanks to Mike for that and pretty exciting that we're finally at this point we've been talking about a long time with v seven and we have some really cool new things that we actually one of the reasons for the repackage is that we've been able to add a couple of great things feature wise in. And John, why don't you tell us about those? Yeah. We definitely need to stop adding things in I think so too. Perpetual release. But, , sliding right at the end at the last minute was the full release of Font Awesome five. I mean, literally it was the day that we were thinking we were completely done. And so, , me thought, oh, , usually this is a fifteen minute project just to update the FontAwesome. And so I went to go do that one night and oh man, they changed a lot. A lot, a lot. They shouldn't even call it FontAwesome five. It just kind of makes it sound it's a little bit of an update. It's really a whole new generation of FontAwesome. And, their changes are all good. I think, I think long term they make sense. I would say all their changes make sense, but a lot of them don't make integration into Rock super easy. It's because they have this new Pro package. And so the Pro package gives you multiple weights, which is really nice. Now you have to pay for the Pro package. There's some other new technologies in it, SVG fonts. But trying to get that all to integrate into, Rock was a challenge. They renamed over a hundred different icons. And obviously, we don't want you guys to have to go in and rename all of your group type icons. And I mean, icons are used all over. So we spent a lot of time remapping all those old icon names into the new ones that kind of map to the same look. We also spent a lot of time to really abstract out the weighting so that if you do buy a pro license, we have a block now that you can upload your pro license. You put your key and your zip file in there and it'll unpack it and put everything where it's supposed to go. And then you can, through the UI, change what weight you want to be seen on each different theme. So it really makes that experience super easy. There's a whole blog post on how it works. And there is a whole chapter in the developing websites for Rock on how Font Awesome kind of works behind the scenes and some things you should know. So I would definitely read the blog post. There's some things that we recommend. for instance, we recommend you keep using the prefix FA. So FA, FACOG. They're going to tell you on their documentation that if you want the weight to be light, you use F A L, FACOG. But that really hard codes that to that weight. We're not really wanting to do that. We want everything to be abstracted so that every church can kind of pick which weight they want. And that will work if you use, continue to use the FA. So that's probably more detail than you want, but, that was a huge effort that is in, V7. You can go play with it on the pre alpha site, if you'd . And whether someone chooses to use a Pro Pack or not, they're still able to use Fun Awesome. Is that right? Yep. Yep. So the free version still is free with some caveats. I mean, it's not freemium that that would be not quite accurate, but man, they really try to hook you in to getting those extra weights. So they would say that it actually ships with two weights and that's not quite true. Only one weight is fully implemented. The other weight is this kind of partially implemented in the free. So you get the solid, which is the big thick one, still looks good. But if you want the regular or the light, you really have to pay for the pro. That's a little confusing because the free one kind of says it has regular and only has some of the fonts for regular. Again So something to look at. Yeah. I think they're doing smart things. I don't think they're doing big frameworks Rock a Service though, because they're really targeting more of these per website kind of development, technologies where you'd pick a font and just use it. But, . And how much is the ProPact for people? I believe now, I think it's $60. It was $30, but that was before it came out. And I think now it's $60. It's still reasonable. And that's just a one time. Yeah. One time. That is reasonable. There's different varieties. There's an whole organization. But for a church, $60 is all you would need. And we make it really easy to integrate that into Rock once you buy it. So fun awesome is still awesome, but it took a little work. It is. Yeah. I was cursing a little bit under my breath. But again, I kept thinking these are smart decisions. These are smart changes. They just kind of kill us. And there are some stuff still coming. They still owe a whole bunch of upgrade packs. So they're going to have these packs that you can download over time and they've committed to making it a lot of them. Think it's 40 some odd packs. Still not quite sure how that's gonna work. We have talked to them and they've given us a high level overview of how it's gonna work, but the proof is in the pudding. And I think when we finally got the final bits for the for the full release, I was shocked at some of the the changes. I just did not expect that. So few challenges up ahead, probably, maybe. Yeah. But it should it should be pretty smooth now for someone using FontAwesome. Yeah. Think the average user is gonna not even notice the difference. Just use the FA prefix and everything will be just fine. Got it. And I learned a lot about LESS. So I mean, there's some things in LESS I didn't know you could do that I now know you can do. All right. So that was one reason that we repackaged, but we had another simultaneous project going on at the same time that we slid into. Tell us about that. Yeah. So in the beginning of the podcast, we heard about Sparkability Group and when you need changes to core that, , we can help with that. And this was an example of that. So a couple of churches came to us and said, Hey, the statement generator is great, but we'd some additional features. And so they hired us to go ahead and make those changes. But I love the community because they were very adamant that they really wanted these changes to be available to everybody, and that they wanted their investment to be a kingdom investment, not just necessarily just a single church investment. So they really wanted us to get this out to other people. Now, it's not something we could probably just put into v six and call it done because we've already packaged all those releases. So we made these changes and we want to get this out so people who want to use it for the twenty seventeen statements can, but we put it in the Rock Shop. It's a free, plugin, which will basically just download the changes that you would need in a v six environment to use this. And it adds a lot. You can add pledges now to your statements. Has a lot more capabilities. Also, we changed the way you you would lay out your reports. Before we had this report generator that you could kind of drag stuff around. And as long as you want to do very basic changes, it was pretty easy. If you want to do anything, less than trivial, it was difficult. So we changed the whole thing. It now uses Lava, So you can make your own Lava template. We ship with three different Lava templates. And so you can adjust things a lot easier now if you if Lava. So if you wanna get started with this, go to the Rock Shop and go ahead and and install that. It does require 6.1. And then the documentation has also been updated in the finances manual. So you can get the details on that. It's pretty easy though. Is this will be in version seven though. This this this full release is in version seven. So if by chance you do run the beta in production, you could use this out of the box. So that's pretty exciting. I love the fact that the community was so adamant that these two churches wanted to make sure that everybody had access to it. Can we share the names of the two churches? Yes. So Woodlands, UMC, and Grace Presbyterian. Presbyterian. Right. I love that generosity too. A big thanks to them and there are a lot of churches that exhibit a similar generosity when they talk to us about projects. And that's what it's all about. Yep. For those churches that have used the old statement generator, that's still there, right? Customize it? No. What? The current statement generator wouldn't well, it's either and one over the other. It's the whole Windows app is totally different now. It looks as quite the same, but there's probably, I think three additional screens now that step you through that wizard. Yeah. So that it's a replacement. Okay. Because there's so much horsepower required on statement generation, we didn't really put tax on the server because it would basically chew up your server resources. So it's a good hybrid. It uses the server to generate, the Lava for the statement, but all the memory and CPU of stitching all that stuff together is done on the client. Yeah. So, before we go on to some of the other topics, let's hear some more from some of our other sponsors. This episode is also brought to you by Rock Partners, Minecart Studios and Kindred. Find your inner superhero with the help of Minecart Rock Plugins. Extend your experience seamlessly and affordably with the leading purveyor of Rock Plugins. You'll find options ranging from the PDF Toolkit, PCO Sync, various storage providers, birthday announcements, and more. Discover your new secret weapon in the Rock Shop. Also brought to you by Kindred. Unleash generosity at your church with Kindred's Smart Giving, a text online and in app giving solution designed to engage new givers. Foster a culture of generosity within your church with a single tap. Swift, simple, powerful. Check out Kindred today and discover your text to give solution. Look up Minecart Studio and Kindred today on our partners page. Alright. Now let's talk about our next topic, which is the conference. So we brought that up a little bit in the past and we've just started talking about it, but if you haven't heard pre registration for Rx twenty eighteen is open and live right now. You can get to it on our website, rockrms.com/rx20eighteen. And we do have our lowest prices running right now. I can tell you that we are going to take all of the feedback we got last year and some of the lessons that we learned as a team and apply that going forward to redo the conference again this year. I mean, if you have come to several of our conferences in the past, that we make every effort to to modify the event based on what current community needs are and lessons learned. And I think what we're going to see next year versus this last year will be one of the biggest changes that we've made, and we're really excited about it. And one of those areas is that we're going to begin offering quite a bit more deep content for many more members of your team. So we're talking communications track. We're talking things for your church leadership, not just a technical conference. Rock will definitely have the things that you need for your technical staff, but we will have so much more. And we're excited to start announcing what some of those tracks are soon, but do know that we're very hard at work on getting the right speakers in, having very high quality content and tracks in a lot of areas. So if you're budgeting right now for, the funds to put aside for this conference, you will want to budget to bring quite a few more of your staff to Rx twenty eighteen than you did to Rx twenty seventeen. And I promise you, it is not something, that you will regret. This is going to be a really dynamic event tailored to a lot of areas. And at the end of each session, we'll be telling you how to take these best practices and this great content you're learning and apply it directly through Rock in your environment. So this is going to be very hands on, high learning, a great place to bring your team and get a plan of attack going forward and then have the Rock tools at hand to do that. Yeah. Super excited about that. Mhmm. So if you can, get on there, check out what we have on the page today, and just know that page will be changing over time as we get more information. We'll be adding things track information and what some of those sessions and speakers are. So all of that is coming, but the best pricing is right now. So if you have the opportunity to lock that in, you can use, your 2017 budget funds if you still have some of that in place, or, just make sure you're planning for enough of your team to come. And we also have we announced already the location? I don't think so. I gonna ask. I don't think we have. So we're very excited about that as well. We will be hosting this year in Louisville, Kentucky at Southeast Christian Church, and that is the August, August twentieth and '20 first. So make sure you put that on the calendar as well. Yeah. It's awesome. That's a location I can't wait to see. I've worked and known those guys forever. I've never been to their home church, but it looks amazing. It does. And they've been so instrumental in Rock and supportive of the team for years and years. This is really an exciting time. Huge church. A couple other things as we're talking about events. Our road shows are coming up starting the first one is gonna be January 17, and it's in Indianapolis. And we have, I don't know, over a dozen of these online right now. You can get to them right off our front page. Rockrms.com/roadshows is the direct link. And, they're free events. It's two hours. You get to hear one hour about what Rock features are, how they work, how the community functions, then another hour of q and a where you get your questions answered about how your environment, specifically can be tailored to meet your needs or what your migration could look . So if you're thinking about, making a move to Rock, then definitely this is something you wanna check out. They are all over the country, and they're free to register for. So make sure and do that, but do register because those help the host churches know what kind of space to set aside to accommodate you. So definitely make sure you check that out, but I know a lot of our listening audience here on the podcast has been using Rock or is a little bit further along the road than that, and I just wanna remind you if that happens to be you as a listener, make sure you share this. The churches that in your area may be not happy with the tools that they have today or maybe they don't even have good tools. So make sure and share this with your colleagues at other churches in your area. Roadshows are a great place to start and a big thanks to our community members who are leading those because our core team does not travel around and put those on. They are hosted and led by local churches that just have been using Rock and are active in the community. And it's really fun to see how the number of hosts and locations is growing each year as more people come online and really step up into leadership. So huge thank you to the community for helping host those. Also, have master classes coming up in 2018, the first of which is in the February. And those the three that are listed right now, you can get to from our front page or directly rockrms.com/masterclass. And those three are all going to be the ones right here in Sun City, Arizona led by the core team, and we really enjoy doing those, but the seats are limited. So make sure if you are going to do that, you get registered soon so you can get yourself and whatever team members you want to bring, in on that while you still can. If you haven't had a chance to look at that, there's a lot of information on the page, plus many members of our community have actually attended already. So if you hop on to Slack and start asking some some questions about Masterclass, I think you'll get some really great answers. And of course, I'd love to help answer any questions if you have them. You can always reach me at emily@sparkdevnetwork.org. And I think that's it for upcoming events. That's a lot. That is. I love that they're at all different levels and for different audiences and and incorporate our community in so many different ways. I'm I'm excited about that. A lot of good things coming up for Rx twenty eighteen and for 2018 in general. Yeah. And we've even been talking a lot about this podcast and how we can improve it in the next year. And, so hopefully we'll have more of them and hopefully we're gonna try to increase the quality of them. So lots of exciting things coming. Vary your content a little bit, maybe give you some more behind the scenes or just kinda let how things go in the day of the life of the core team sometimes. Try to bring in more of our core team too, some of the other folks that work here at Spark and let you get to know them a little bit better too. Yep. It Should be lots of fun. Well, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. And today's show was produced by Emily Forman. And Nick was our audio engineer and does all the post processing of putting out on social media. And Jim Michael does all the editing of the audio. And our amazing show notes are typed up and put together by Michael Garrison. 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.