Podcast Episode 38: Episode 11: Rock 1.0 Release

Description

Rock 1.0 is here! Find out more about the release and the the results of the CITRT conference.

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. We have some big news we've been waiting to share with you a long time. Nick is going to fill us in on the one point zero release of RockRMS. Well, I'm not sure they don't already know. But yes, one point zero is now out. We are pretty excited about that. We made the big announcement at the conference last week. And we've even gotten some reports already of churches that have started using Rock in production. One of them I know this weekend is using it for check-in. So we're pretty excited about that. And if you guys can, send us links to any photos or videos you take and we'll try and highlight them in our feeds. Absolutely, we'd love to have that. Or send them on social and tag us and we'll look for those too. Good stuff. All right, well you mentioned the conference last week, we probably should find out a little bit more about that. Yeah. So we had a great conference, a CITRT conference in Peoria, Illinois. And, we started out with a pre day. We had over 60 people at the pre day, which is kind of blown away by that. Definitely wasn't expecting that many people. But we had a great time in the morning. We just kind of went over some of the items that we thought would be of high interest. And in the afternoon, we took the time to just go through a whole bunch of Q and A, answering everybody's questions and talking about what the future of Rock is. Some of those sessions are available on our website. If you go to rocrms.com/catrt, you can also see it on the blog page. I'll link to it there. Some of those pre sessions are online. We were not able to get the Q and A part online because we just couldn't get the mics going as we passed it around. We didn't have that. So we do have it on video, but you can barely hear anything, so it's probably not worth posting. But the pre session and then there's a Rock walkthrough we did for some of the folks who hadn't had a lot of exposure to Rock yet. Both of those are online. The conference in went on for another additional three days. And in that time, I don't know how many different sessions we did. We probably did 19. 19 sessions. I think that was the total. Yeah. Wow. And so almost all of those sessions have been recorded and are available on under the learn section of Rock Now. So you can go through and you can see everything that we talked about. There's a ton of of great content in there. I mean, literally hours and hours and hours of content in there. And I think that video content is going be a great, addition to the learning. We have, , we have our written documentation, but now we have these videos you can watch too. I think they work well together because the videos give you a great overview and that written documentation extends a little bit further and tells you about some of the little edge cases in terms of configuration. I really think they complement each other well. I would probably start by watching some of the videos on a topic you're interested in and then follow-up by reading the documentation. But do not think that the videos by themselves will give you everything you need to know because we're really talking about a high level. While there's hours and hours and hours of content there, we simply couldn't talk about it all. I think that was a common frustration when we ended a session. Was , and that's just the beginning. ? So but there's some really good explanations too of using Rock as a content management system in some of those videos. If you're interested in being a developer of Rock, there's a ton of great content there too where you can get your whole development environment set up and write your first blocks just by following the videos. So I really think those will be a great tool, and we'll be continuing to add more videos as we have time to to author those and and and come up with ideas of stuff we wanna do. So, but I think that got us zero to 60 real fast at conference. So Sure. Well, sounds there are a lot of videos available. Do you have a recommendation for where someone should start? Well, it kind of depends on what you're interested in. I think the groups one is a good one. It's a really fast overview of group structures and how to set up group structures. If you're new to Rock, there's an introduction to Rock too. And I think what's good about that is it's going to tell you a little bit about Rock as a project and the ecosystem we hope to develop with Rock. It kind of gives you a good strategy of of why it was Rock created. It's not so much walking you through the screens and showing you. In fact, it's very little of that. It's more about Rock as a project and why is it started and what's our vision and future. And then I guess I just keep going through the administrative videos. There's some great ones on workflows. So if you kind of keep hearing about workflows but don't quite understand it yet, I think those videos would be a great resource. And I think also, I think the one area we've not really done a lot of talking about is the CMS tools. And I think that was, well covered at conference and there's a lot of good content there. And that was the session we had the greatest attendance at for breakout sessions, The CMS? Yeah, that was a highly attended one. Because I think that there's a key vision in Rock being a solid CMS, not as an afterthought, not as , well, in case you need it. That's really part of the big part of the vision is taking your all your data about your people, and merging it and personalizing the content experience that you folks have on the website. You can't do that unless they operate in the same database. There's plenty of great examples of why you'd want to do that and how you could do that. It really kind of blows your mind. You get to really think differently that you don't just write content for a page. You look at the person who might be visiting that page and you write different content for each of the profiles of that who that person could be. Instead of writing just one generic that speaks to everybody and says nothing, you can write very specific content and target it to certain people who are logged in. And I can say from a communications perspective that has all sorts of exciting implications. Yeah. I mean, just the thought of having a baptism page and saying the same thing to everybody. Well, , probably a lot of people are already baptized, so that should be a very different message. For them, it's all about getting their friends and relatives baptized versus trying to get them baptized. , there's already a check mark in that box. , that's a different message. And I know a lot of churches have a next step concept or something they would people to continue to do. So that makes it very easy to prioritize your next steps and then speak to the person who's logged in on your webpage and help them actively link to and be able to take the next step, whatever that is your church decides. Exactly. Great stuff. David, you had something for us about versioning I think this morning. Sure. Just given with the one point zero being out, think it's good to cover how we're versioning Rock and what the version number means. So one point zero, actually the official release is McKinley one point zero. You can kind of tell that there's three parts to that. There's the McKinley, the one, and the point zero, which kind of represents the three different types of releases we do. The first one, the McKinley, That is a major, infrequent, breaking change. We don't plan to do very many of those. It's something that every couple of years, if there's a big architecture change, that number would change. We're modeling it after mountain names. We'd choose a different mountain name. But again, those are going to be infrequent. So McKinley, you're going to see for a little while. The next number is our feature releases. So one point zero, we have some features. The next release that we add new features will be two point zero, McKinley two point zero. And we plan to do those probably about three, maybe four times a year to get some new features out there. The last version is our fixes. If we release something and something needs to be fixed, we want to be able to release small bug fixes that can be applied without worry of it really breaking anything or sneaking new stuff in there that you wouldn't realize. So those would be more frequent, right? Yeah. And actually we've already released the 1.1 and we're getting ready to do 1.2. And is it a pretty easy install? Yeah. It's the same update process that we've always had. One click update button from one point zero to 1.1, and then from 1.1 to 1.2. So along with features or versions, the roadmap plays into that, especially for the feature releases. We do have a new Trello site for our roadmap. The easiest way to get to that would be off of going to the website, going under features. There's a link on that page to it. And it's a Trello site, so there's cards that we have for each feature that we're looking at. And you can vote on them or comment on them. We'd people to go there and take a look at that and just give feedback on what's coming. Good. Sounds great. Well, it's a pretty exciting time around here for Rock and and with Spark, Development Network. And a lot of, what we've been doing up to now has been pretty internal. We've been working pretty hard and sharing some of that when we're able to. Then the beta phase came along and we were able to be a little more interactive with the people who've been following Rock. And now that we've, released the one point o, 1.1 version, this is the great time for for other churches and organizations to get involved. I know, Nick, you mentioned that we already have reports of some who are getting ready to use this in live production. So, we're really excited to be able to work, very organically with the people who've been following this process for a long time. And as part of that is coming along, just really encourage those of you who are the decision makers at your organization to consider, beginning to invest in Rock. What we're doing is, it it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and frankly, we have some costs related to the tools that we're recommending to you. We want to make this process as easy as possible for the organizations that use it. And part of that is knowing that what we're doing is working well with the tools that you have available. In order to do that, there's a little bit of a budget that goes along with it. We have hosting costs and some other organizational expenses that are actually quite minor to what we're doing but they are there. And one of the great things about Rock is that we're really extravagantly free product. So we know there are very small organizations around the world that haven't been able to work through a church management system, that are operating in Excel and Outlook. Mhmm. And this is literally gonna change the way that they work. But there are other organizations that this can function for that are quite a bit bigger. And, what they're going to be able to do is move from a really expensive platform to great technology that doesn't have a price tag associated with it. What we'd love to encourage you to do is to look at what you're donating now for your church management system and just consider starting at a donation of 10% of that toward Rock. And what that will do is help us be able to keep the same pace that we've been keeping, provide the same level of service, and keep those features coming, the things that are going to really revolutionize the way your organization operates. So if you are the decision maker, we encourage you to begin, as you're looking at transitioning to using Rock, to right now begin to invest in so that we can deliver what you need. As always, we are listening to the needs of the people who are using this and we encourage you to make that a full partnership. If you're not the decision maker at your organization, , we just ask that you start sharing this as you're sharing, hey look this is what Rock can do for us. Consider sharing this is what we can do for Rock. And again at 10% of what you're currently spending, know that's a pretty easy chunk of money to invest in something that's really revolutionizing kingdom here on earth. And right now, you're paying zero. You have nothing. No cost for CHMS. It's a pretty easy 10% right there as well. So we do consider Rock an extravagantly free system and we want to invest in the kingdom ourselves, which we have been, but that is a partnership as well. So investing. Thanks to those who've been, sharing their time with us and giving insights into what they need. That has been huge as we've moved from beta to one point zero. And, we just are are really encouraged by the group of supporters that we have here at Round Rock. Definitely. Huge. All right, well until next time, thanks so much. 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 road blocks 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.