Podcast Episode 35: Development Update

Description

Find out what's been happening behind the scenes as our developers continue the push to the 1.0 release.

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 back to our eighth episode of the Rockcast podcast. We have a lot to tell you about what's been going on in the last two months. So let's just get started. So you're right. A lot has been going on. Been working on a lot of code for version one and some code that, isn't listed on the version one list, but we really need it for our own churches. So but it's exciting code nonetheless. But I think, , one of the things I think people can see right away is is some of the new documentation that's been released that you've been working on. Emily, why you go over that? We do have a lot of documentation right now. We have some, that's complete, some that's on the wish list, and some that's in process right now. We have, recently released the CMS guide, for websites which will be really exciting to read although it is a little longer than most of our other guides. There's a lot to cover there but we still have tried keep that same interactive, fun, easy to work through voice. A lot of screenshots so don't get overwhelmed if you pull it up and see a page count. There are a lot of illustrations and screenshots to help you work through that one. We're working a little bit on reporting and prayer. And then you can see we have another, oh, I don't know, probably eight guides that are available online if you go to the, the learn page of our our website. And there's that communication guide too that we can start people can jump in and start kind of looking at that and getting that configured. Just keep in mind that the guides are also in beta. It's a good first stab, but point out areas that don't make sense or point out areas that need a little bit more attention. Exactly. And we've had a few people do that and we actually really appreciate it. We are these are obviously living documents and they'll continue changing as we work through things. We'll give them all a good once over before we launch into one point zero down the road. But in the meantime, if you see anything that's an error, if it's a step we left out or if it's a spelling error, feel free to shoot us an email. Let us know about that. And we'll be happy for an extra set of eyes. Yeah. And I always appreciate when they give the feedback. Some people have even put , , you probably should write something this and they've clarified the writing. That's so helpful. Because a lot of times then we just copy and paste that in and the documents then become almost a community type document. And that's kind of what we want. Yep. For sure. David, what about code? Well, we have been doing a lot. Workflow, recently we have been working a lot on workflow just making some UI around capturing data for particular workflows so that it can really be used as kind of a screen flow. Somebody fills in some requests, it gets routed to somebody else, they can add additional information and just putting a lot of UI around the existing workflow processing that we already had. We will be including that in an update soon. Metrics, we have been doing a lot with metrics dashboard, so a lot of charting and just displaying a lot of data that is inside Rock. We have put a lot of work in the check-in too trying to get that ready. Not only just putting final touches on getting labels printed in the regular check-in but I think the iOS app is pretty much got that done. Think we have the Windows based app done too that can print using USB printers so the labels can print that way which is kind of a Right. Still have the same limitation on being a Zebra printer but now it doesn't have to be a networked to be a Zebra printer. Can now be a USB Zebra So let's pause on check-in for a moment. Will people be able to really go through and start using and testing check-in? Will it be with this 01/2009 release that's coming up? And if so, will that also then include the iOS app? Yeah. So I'm working on getting that iOS app into the App Store now. I mean, that's one of the things I was working on yesterday. So it should be fairly soon, , sometimes it could take, , two weeks to get it approved by Apple. But to be honest, today, since the beta you've been able to play with check-in, I think the biggest limitation is the documentation is not there yet. So it would be really hard for someone, I think, to figure it out. , that said, it's there. And that's probably the next document we're looking at getting to. I think we have a solid outline. Legitimately, it could be three or four weeks before that document is written, edited, screenshots, and then available on the website. Okay. So in the meantime they may see with the next release when it comes out the new labels that we've added in. The kind of out of the box reports. They just again may not know exactly how to make their own custom ones yet. But we will have them in the next update. Right. And again in the update process, so those things are almost invisible, right? Unless where to go look for them and what to do with And there's a ton of functionality in Rock that is there, but if you don't know what to do I mean, I think workflow is not one of those great exciting things, but that document isn't even in an outline form. And that that's gonna be a a great document to write. It's gonna be a very powerful document, but it's gonna be a very difficult one to fully wrap our arms around everything. And then simplicity applying simplicity to to how we explain that. Looking forward to having that one done because I people are gonna be really happy with it, but it's gonna be difficult to get all that articulated well. Yeah. So but I think, , in terms of the one o release, check-in is probably the one column of functionality that's closest to being done. Just have some attendance reporting to do and some kiosk manager features that we need to kind of complete. It has the most blue dots on the board in terms of being complete, so that's good. And we're real happy about being able to print to USB. We weren't quite sure if that was going to work. I know we talked about communications last time too, but one of the things we didn't talk about was two way SMS. So using Twilio now we can do, as long as things are configured correctly we can actually do two way SMS communication. When you send out a bulk SMS message to several people, if anyone replies you can now get that reply and respond to it and really have that two way dialogue which was kind of a challenge to get done and kind of unique. I don't think there's too many places where you can send a bulk SMS message and then actually have a conversation with people as they reply. What does that look for the recipient on their end? The recipient, it looks just as if they were having a normal SMS text messaging conversation with somebody else. If they know the person the message is sent from, the number, they may not recognize the number, but it is a conversation. The person that initiated it, their response will have a code that when they reply to it they just need to include that code in the reply. But that's just on the staff person's side. Okay. And do they need to do that from an actual desktop or can they do that from mobile as well? Right from their phone. That sounds pretty simple. And just to clarify, that when you say send in bulk, that is not a group message. Imagine the chaos of Yeah. A hundred people responding back and forth to each other. That's not happening. Yeah. I hate those. And that's all written in in a provider model. So today we support Twilio, but we could easily support others. In fact, was just reading a great article last night that talked about some of Twilio's competitors and and some of them actually had some really incredible pricing. So I was looking at their API and I'm this would be pretty simple to support any of these with the same exact features, even the two way. It would be pretty trivial to write these. I think right now we don't really care about the Twilio one. We got it, it's done. But it's just cool when you can look at that and say, well, in a matter of a couple of hours we could have another service done. Speaker one: Some other things that we've been working on are kind of for the community. We're trying to put together what we are calling a Rock kit, which is really just a tool that churches can use to basically set up an environment where they can add on to Rock. They will go to our site, put in their church's domain name or church name, download and it will actually install a source version of Rock customized for their church with their correct namespaces and so they can really start doing their own kind of extra development for Rock if they need some extra functionality. But it's really geared for developers who want to extend Rock. Right. And sort of a shortcut to having to really learn all of the naming conventions. We by default just implement all those naming conventions for your church and your domain. So you'll immediately see the pattern in how you're supposed to write your next piece of functionality. I think it's going to be an awesome little tool once it's up on the site. And it saves you just a ton of little teeny they're easy steps but but you make one mistake and now you're frustrated. We've taken all that away and it it's just download and you're almost productive right away. Yeah. I was looking at the open source project just yesterday and I had I had this laundry list of small things I had to tweak before I could even get to run. And they documented it, but it was still kind of a pain. What about impact statistics? Are we now collecting them? We are. As of the 01/2006, '7, and '8 patch, Trio patch I'll call it, I think now after, or as of 01/2008, we can now see some statistics out there. We can see statistics. I suppose you're going to ask me if I've looked at them. Well, don't think we have them yet, , exposed in any of our code. I know we're collecting them. In the future we'll be able to share some of And just to kind of that's just really if you've installed who's installing it, what the church name is. And very limited kind of data there. Just to help us share the success of Rock. Yeah. It's really geared for the one point zero release. But it's also kind of nice to see who's with us in the pilot phase and then the beta phase. Well, that's all opt in, too. See, if you uncheck the box, we don't harvest any of that data. Right. So I was looking at it just last night up to 188 organizations who've registered to be able to download Rock. Obviously, we have more in our newsletter, but that was pretty amazing. And there's still worldwide impact of it too. It's pretty crazy to see all those different countries who are using it. Yeah. And that's something too that we've been working a little bit on is trying to do some limited internationalization at least with phone numbers and currency symbols and we still need to do addresses, we'll be doing that pretty soon. Yeah. Just to make it a little bit easier. Right. So then we've also been working on a demo site. We know a lot of people while the install is pretty easy, it is kind of a stumbling block if you just wanted to peek under the covers real quick. So we are going to be putting up a demo site that might be ready early next week that you can just log into. You can play around. You can add people to. We'll just wipe it probably once a week and have people go in there and play. So that should be coming up soon. We'll be keeping that up to date too as we get updates. So always be up to date. So if you see that an update's been released and you just want to kind of go see what that update was about, you can always just go to the demo site. Kind of using our fictitious Rock solid church. Right. And if they rush to the demo site, they might even be able to do the update. Right? Hopefully not. But hopefully I'll get it quick enough that they don't have to do the update. Because I actually need to do the steps in the right way. In fact, maybe I should secure the update. Thanks Nick. Great Nick. That's right. I could just roll it back and then re update. It would be fine. Yeah. We'll let people update it themselves. Because it's a cool process. It works real well. So yes, that's going to be another really cool thing that you can be able to jump on and do. We're going to be rolling out probably a newsletter soon here with some updates. We've got some blog posts to come out soon. Yep. So it's been busy. Yeah and we just continue to also address a lot of the issues that are brought up by the beta testers. I mean keep those coming whether it's functionality, whether it's styling. Know John's been working a lot on doing a lot of CSS changes just to make things rendered even better on mobile devices. So just a lot of little things. Yeah, in fact we could have a little bit of a kind of a big style change coming where we change up some of the colors. So that will be coming in probably in the next update. So it will be interesting to see what feedback is on that. I think long term it has a lot of benefits for us. Kind of going with a more neutral palette. I know there's been some talk of groups of people getting together to hang out. At one point we thought maybe we'd even do that here in the next few months, and maybe that will still happen. But we're definitely planning on making maybe some big announcements too at Refresh Cash in October. So alongside the Church IT Networks roundtable. So definitely if you guys are planning or yeah, make plans to attend that. Yeah, I would definitely. I think that's going be one of the highlights of the year for Rock is that meet up conversations that can be had there. So I mean, you're even considering just even using it, I think that's a great place to go because, A, we can all talk face to face. But B, you can surround yourself with hundreds of other people who do the same thing and share best practices. Practices. And there'll be lots of other vendors there who do church management. So I think it's a great opportunity just to kind of see everything and talk to really the people who use the product, not just the vendor, and kind of get some best practices. So I would say if you're involved in any way, shape or form with church management systems, you should be at that conference. That should be the one thing you should go to. Yeah. And especially if you're if you're planning on developing. , if you're going to do any custom development in Rock, this is the place to be to kind of kick start yourself. And registration is now open. So if you go to the Church IT Network website, you can register. Yeah. And they it's a great conference and it's really cheap. So I mean, there really shouldn't be any obstacles. So before we wrap up, is there anything else that we wanted to touch on from this board? Well, know, one the things I look at the board and it's slowly becoming going from white circles to blue circles, which means it's complete. I think it's really going to be picking up here soon because we've we've David kind of alluded to before, we've been working on a lot of features that we had an immediate need for within our church. They're going be part of core. I think they're great features. Everybody's going to want them. And we've always had plans to have them in core. But it might have been more of a 1.2 feature for us or a two point zero feature. But we had to jump in there and get those things done. I think the workflow is amazing. I think it's going to be really useful in every church. But these dots should be coming blue fairly quick now that we can put all of our development efforts into just what's on that board. And that's the board of features for one point Right. Someday we might have to post that. It's kind of ugly, but it's just a whiteboard. It would a good photo to put on the You have to clean up some of the random drawings I put next to things. Don't know what some of it is. So that's about all the updates I think we have. I would say there's lots of other channels for people to get involved with in terms of getting out to reading the documentation, asking questions through the website, putting new feature requests into our little black book online. Definitely get involved and if there's something you have a question about, definitely post it on the website and let the community help you with those. So until 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.