Podcast Episode 36: Episode 9: Summer Update

Description

In this episode we discuss Rock development progress over the past few months.

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. Hello and welcome to our ninth episode of the Rockcast Podcast. Thanks for joining us today. We have a lot to talk about. We have been a little bit quiet this summer while we've been heads down working to get some features added, working on some documentation, and we have a lot to share with you today. One: Yeah. So we have today we're releasing point one zero of our beta. Lots of updates in that. Emily mentioned, we've been working really heads down trying to get a lot of things out. And this update is full of new things. I think the first thing you're going to notice right off the bat is a total new look. A little bit of history, little bit of background that we've always just had this, , people the look. We've always had this slight tinge of just we weren't quite happy with it. So we took some time. We really looked at a ton of other sites for inspiration. And we did two things. We changed the layout. You'll find the layouts different. The navigation is now on the left and it's very skinny, so it doesn't take up any real So the layout is completely different. But then we also changed the colors. And we worked with one of the designers, Kyle, on our team, and he gave us some inspiration on some colors that we could use that are just a little bit nontraditional. And I think it's kind of cool to talk about the colors because in most web apps, you'll you'll notice if you look at all of them, they're very cool and and clean. They're very silvers, whites, blues. This is a little bit warmer. It still has a lot of the same, , design aesthetics of being flat and modern. But he brought to it and kind of showed us some colors or more browns, tans, orange. Earth tones. Right. And the thing I love about it is that Rock is really about relationships. It's about fostering relationships. It's about identifying relationships. It's about pointing out relationships that exist in the data. And it was kind of ironic that in the past we were using very cold colors for that. And this feels more warm. It kind of almost feels more relational, almost as if you're meeting someone at, , for coffee or you're meeting someone at the library or your favorite reading place, Barnes and Noble or something. And I think it's just kind of cool that the interface now has that warmth to it. There's a kind of a good balance to what the product actually does. So that will probably be the first thing you notice right off the bat. It'd be kind of hard not to notice that. And we've done a lot of style cleanup, a lot of markup cleanup. There's still some to go. You might run into a page that has not been restyled, and we'll be looking for those. Let us know if you see those. We've already found a few ourselves. So we continue to keep putting that in, getting that all ready for the one point release. Another thing that you will not see unless you reinstall the product is that the installer is brand new. We got a lot of great compliments on the installer. A lot of people were were kinda blown away with how how good it was, but it for us, it just wasn't quite good enough. I think the one thing we always hated is those long waits. We had no idea what was going on in the background, and I think, it freaked a few people out. So we completely rewrote it. It's completely new. And now exactly what's going on at every given step. It uses a new technology called SIGNA R, and so you're in direct communication with what's going on on the server, and you can see basically everything under the hood. It even has a little console, you can click that and you can see really everything that's going on on the server, can you can see. And it kinda just removes one or two of those really long pauses, And we think it's a lot better. And again, if people do want to play with that and test that in different environments, let us know if they run into any issues. Although you've run through it pretty well. Yeah. I mean, we've run through it fairly well. I think we definitely would love to see a lot more testing on that. On that note, that installer probably won't roll it out till maybe Monday. So today's Friday, so if you'd if you'd wait till Monday, that'd probably be best. And then it'll be on our on our web page. Yeah. It'll be just yeah. Yeah. Right. But totally new environment. In fact, if you're interested, we'd love for you just to reinstall someplace else and just test it out and make sure you kick the tires. There's just so many things that are different in different environments. And some people trying different things, even people trying to install it on Linux. We've actually added a few things that kind of help you, warn you if you're on Linux that this is not going to work. But David, what else is in this update? We've been doing a lot of finishing up features for getting ready for the actual one point update. I think we talked a little bit last time about workflow, but there's more functionality around workflow. And probably the big thing is just the way that it can do forms and really form navigation. For example, the contact page on the sample site that gets installed is using workflow. So that's one thing to take a look at. Plus we added several other sample workflows for things IT requests or facilities requests. There's one there for launching a workflow from the person profile when there's an issue with a person that needs to be taken care of by somebody else. So just the idea of workflow using forms is a pretty powerful thing that's in this release. And then there's other blocks that go along with that where you can see the requests that you may have started responsible for and just different ways of navigating workflows. Another area is check-in. We've just kind of been going through there and making sure everything is working as we finish up the documentation for that. We've added some attendance reporting. We've added a check-in manager site that is kind of a mobile friendly page that lets people view the current attendance in rooms, close and open rooms, and just kind of be a way of managing an ongoing check-in. Some other things, metric dashboard, which is just kind of a graphical way of looking at different metrics all on one page. We've added some group mapping tools, which is more of a dynamic map using Google Maps, where you can view and see group either polygon areas or group points where they may be or the child groups. You can even see the members that happen to live inside a geographic boundary. Another thing was international address support. If you turn that on, any place you use an address, you will see the ability to pick a country and then based on that country, the formatting and the entry will change a little bit. That's all configurable. If you pick Canada, for example, you're going to see state change to province, territory, and zip change to postal code. It's kind of dynamic based on the country you pick for an address. We keep an eye on the issues that people have entered and we're trying to address as many of those as we can. Several of those are fixed too. One thing to note on a lot of these things that are in this release, the documentation is still trying to catch up to a lot of these features. While they might be there, the documentation is probably, well, depending on which one is probably pretty far behind. Check-in should be coming out fairly soon, probably in the next, two weeks. It's all in the rough draft is completely done. Now it needs to go to proofing, editing, then it has to be HTML. The images have to be made. So we're probably about two weeks out on that. But that is a very substantial guide. That's probably the longest guide to date that we have and probably the most complex one that we have to do. So having that in the rearview mirror would be kind of nice to to to to be in that state. So just, , go and poke around at those, but they'll make a lot more sense, think, when we have the documentation. Yeah, especially when it comes to the workflow stuff. We don't expect that you'll really be able to figure that out without some documentation. Don't frustrated. Great. I think the best thing that David mentioned, the contact form. Go in there, look at the workflow that already exists for the contact form. It's a very simple basic one. But to Nick's point, don't get frustrated if you can't figure it out. But if you wanted to poke around that, you could look at that one and see how it's constructed. But we're already using some of that in production here at CCV, it's nice to actually see it coming together. That's another point too. That's one thing that changed since our last podcast is we are using this in a somewhat production environment here at CCV. Not all of our staff is on it using it day to day, but we do have some staff using it on a day to day basis. All of our data is in there or a good portion of our data is in there. So it's nice to see it actually being used in the real world and And getting feedback from them. Right. Yeah. We've already gotten some some good feedback. And so it's kinda nice now as a part of our day, we're we're actually using it in in the real world. We're logging into a real Rock instance with hundreds of thousands of records using it the way it should be. Another thing just to kind of put on your calendars, coming up in October, October '20 first, we're having a Rock meeting. This will be in Peoria, Illinois, not Peoria, Arizona, which is where we're at, but Peoria, Illinois. That is the day before the CITRT three day conference, which is a great conference and you should stay and go to that also. But this first pre day is just all Rock. You can come, you can ask any question you want. This is not just for developers, this is for anybody who wants to get familiar with it, who's already using it, who wants to ask questions, who wants to hear about the direction that we're going. Pretty much anything, there's no wrong question or right question on that day. Just come in, bring your questions, we'll probably split up so we can, if developers want to go talk about development, can. And for those who want to just dig deeper into it, we'll go in a different direction. So just put that in your calendar, October 21. We'll start first thing in the morning. Yeah, 9AM. Yep. And we'll just go all day. And there's no registration necessarily for our event. But if you're going to the Church IT Network event, they have a registration. So you'll need to register for their event. But ours is open and free. Right. And theirs is very, very reasonably priced. The price shouldn't really be a reason not to go to theirs. Oh, it's $75 Right. Yeah. That includes a lot of your meals too. Yeah. All lunch and dinners. Yeah. So it's probably one of the best values out there. And we will be there for that. And we'll be continuing to talk about Rock all throughout that part of the conference too. Don't feel it's just one day and then I don't have any other options. We're going to be there through Friday and we will be there talking about Rock pretty much exclusively. Right. When there's workshop and breakout sessions, during any of those we'll have a breakout session pretty much dedicated to some aspect of Rock. Whether it's developing or administering, we're in the process of getting ready to formulate exactly what we're gonna which sessions we'll have. But yeah, it'll be Rock all week. Right. And then outside of what we will be talking about, there's always other great topics I think people would . There's some topics on church management, whether using Rock or Arena or Fellowship One. Or ministry platform. Right. Yeah, ministry platform definitely has a good representation there that is good just to cross pollinate ideas. Because all these ideas, it doesn't really matter what software you're using, it's more the concepts. There'll be people talking about external websites. A little bit on social media, though last time I actually got pretty deep on some social media stuff. Mobile? Mobile development, yeah. Actually, we have a mobile developer new here at CCV. He will be there and he's going to be talking a lot about his experiences with Xamarin in terms of a mobile platform and he's very excited about it. So there's just a lot of other great topics. He's excited about Tamarin, not excited about presenting. Oh, he's going do great. We'll stretch him. Yeah. He's awesome. You're going to learn a ton if you want to know about mobile development and some of the stuff that we've been working and researching. We've been doing a lot of experimentation with iBeacons and trying to figure out how we're going to be using that to do adult attendance. So there's lot of other exciting topics other than Rock. So definitely encourage you to go to that conference. Also, you want to review your whole network, there'll be a ton of guys there you could talk to. So let's talk about what's left. We've we've alluded to our whiteboard of features, think in a couple different podcasts. And I think we'll actually try and get a picture of it so you can see what we're talking about. It's not pretty, but it's pretty exciting, when we look at where we've been and where we're going, toward the, one point zero release. So how does that look? Can you describe where we're at, what it looks a little bit? Well, think we're sitting pretty good. I mean, there's quite a bit checked off. A lot of things remaining are not that hard. The biggest thing is probably integration testing. We're just continuing to use it, to make sure everything's polished, to make things easy. I think the scariest, biggest thing right now is the documentation. But everything else we kinda know what we need to do. We just need to do it. And it's coming along well. I think we're we're we're great on our schedule for releasing it in in October. '1 other note about documentation. We keep having our documentation feedback. But, we know that there are some things that need to be updated in our current documents already. So if you've noticed any of those things, changes will be coming. Again, our documentation moves more slowly than some of our, feature development even. So those changes are coming, although we welcome hearing from you if if you've noticed anything as well. You wanna send along, hey, this needs to change. Here's what I'd recommend saying now. Or, we know the screenshots all will need to be updated to our new look as well. So that's coming slowly, but we will have that done. So I think we're feeling good about one-zero and the release. We keep talking about that whiteboard. There's also another board we have up in our office, which is what we need to do next after one point zero. So we'll be quickly moving to that after getting the one point zero board. We're definitely there's really going to be no rest after one point zero. It's just going be straight into the next board. Because our next goal is to get CCV completely 100% running on Rock. And then maybe we will take a day off. So that's pretty much all we have to talk about today. We'll be back in trying to get these on a more routine basis. If you have feedback, let us know. We'd to know even if this format is really that helpful. If you have feedback on that, we'd love to hear about it. Or any topics that you want to hear. Definitely. Let's get into a little more deeply. We'll be happy to hear about that too. Definitely. Until then. 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.