Podcast Episode 32: Beta Roll-out Recap

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In this episode we discuss the roll-out of the beta and our new community tools.

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 our Beta Week ROTCast podcast. We are here to talk about how things have been going. So I think we've got some great statistics and metrics from the week. David, what can you share with us? We got lots of numbers. Actually, higher numbers than I was expecting, so I think we're happy about that. We have 93 churches that have actually registered. And we about 113 installs happened this week, which is much higher than I was thinking. Yeah. Way more than we than I was thinking. Yeah. You guys were in the twenties and thirties range, think, and I predicted 50 were all around. Word Debbie Downer. Yep. A little bit. Pretty much. So 113 in one week is pretty good. About 172 people watched the install video on how to install Rock. And what's even more exciting is we have people starting to participate in the Q and A forum. So we had 14 questions asked, and even better, 29 answers. And those are mostly people in the community answering, which is great. And then we also have about three fifty seven subscribers to our newsletter. Pretty good numbers. Yeah. And overall site traffic I think took a dramatic spike too. I mean that's good to see too. People out there looking at documentation just visiting the site. So, so I think there's a lot of intangibles that you can't show in numbers that, , we've seen this just people through emails sharing encouragement and and social media was huge. For sure. We had a lot of people sharing some successes that they've had. We had a couple of those great, selfies with Rock in the background. So if you have more of that to share, feel free. It was pretty fun. Yeah. And there was a lot of great feedback, , that I've been passing along to you guys to share. Just people are really excited about the level, the quality, the documentation. I think that caught them by surprise. Just where the level of the Rock is at. Yeah. And someone got a balloon from their staff. Yes. I I shared it with you guys. Not the balloon. You brought the card. Just bring me just be completely honest here. I'll bring the balloon in for next Friday. Obviously, you have an attachment to that balloon. But hey, guys, thanks for all your positive feedback. It does energize us. So we we do to see it and, we do appreciate it. Yeah. It's it's one those things you kind of release and you don't know what people are thinking because you you can't sit there. You wanna be right next to them and and watch them, , but But that's creepy. Sometimes. I don't know. Maybe just some. It'll be creepy. Otherwise, I feel reassured and and comforted by the fact that there's someone there with them. We'll agree to disagree on that one. So oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Emily. No. I just wanted to follow-up on one of the things David mentioned about the the q and a site. Perfect. There's been we've had a lot of answers there that have come from the community. Yes. And I had a question about that. David, are all those actual answers or some of those just more questions? Some some of them have been more questions. So I think I think what you're wanting to get at is kind of how we should be using the Q and A for Yeah. I was wondering if that was part of the issue. Really it's what we're hoping for, what it's set up for, is to be able to ask a question and then get an answer. There's lots of places where there's discussion forums. That's not quite really how we envision the Q and A being used. We really want it to be a searchable place that people, if they have a similar question, can go find a similar, find that similar question and then see an answer to it. So I think it's important that we, as we use that, we ask one question and then we try and answer that in the answers. Because, , those answers are going to get voted up they're gonna get accepted, so they're not always gonna be in the same order that people respond. So it's not a discussion thread. So your answer, , or if answering somebody previous to you that may not end up in that order. Right. And so it'll get really confusing. So the summary advice is just avoid putting more questions in the answer section. Think of it as you get your kind of one shot to answer it, make count. And can they go back and edit those answers if they want? They can have their own. And they can answer a question too. And that's what they should do. Right. And there is the ability to comment too. I mean, some people may not see that yet because we want people to kind of have some experience points. But as you get those, you'll be able to comment on both questions and answers. So, you have , if you feel you want to participate, but it's not quite an answer, can always comment on the question. So you need 50 points, right? Is that the number? 50 reputation points and then you can comment. And there's some rules about how you get points, right? asking a question. Mhmm. And then if your if your question gets upvoted and if your answers get upvoted, you'll get a lot of points, right? Yeah. And the biggest probably jump in points is when your answer is accepted. So I think if you're the one that asked the question, make sure you're going in there and accepting one of the answers which is just a check mark. Whenever you feel it has been answered the best, make sure to go back and accept those. And that is not to say they couldn't later on choose a different answer and accept that one and unaccept the other one, right? So yeah, go for it and accept those acceptable answers. One thing that I think too is maybe try to ask only one question at a time in in one post. So , you can have multiple questions, but try not to batch up two questions in one. Because that makes the searchability a little bit harder. It makes it a little bit harder in the future to to to share those. Well, not to mention the title won't really match a particular question. And really the title should capture what the question is about. Exactly. So I think David Stevens had a really great idea. He was at Newspring and he said, , we should make it so you could deep link into the answers. So you could, , have a link there. You could almost If someone had the same question, could forward them just that link to the answers. So we're going to be adding that probably this weekend and rolling it out sometime next week. So I thought that was a very good idea. The other thing too is we also have issues. I would say the first place to go to is the questions. Would default to asking a question first. Then if other people either have the same problem or you're sure it's an issue then put it in as an issue. If there's some if you're not quite sure whether you should be entering a question or opening a new issue, I would default to say ask the question first. Or search for the question. Yeah. This might already be there. So David if someone puts in a question that is actually an issue is that something where you would jump in and say hey this is an issue can you put it over there or do you give some time for the community to respond? How does that work? I would say if we know it's an issue or we determine it's an issue, we'll either open the issue ourselves or we'll mention in the Q and A to open an issue. Okay. I would say if it's something that's blowing up and it's an issue. Yeah, don't be afraid to open a new issue, but just if you're not sure, I'd say default to the question. Yeah, and the community may have also noticed that we haven't jumped in to answer a lot of questions, but that's on purpose. That's, , we really want you guys out there to be able to do that and we'll back you up and we'll upvote your answers and you'll get the points, not us. Right. In fact, you look at that next to us, we don't even show our points because we don't want to be competing with the community. We want be building up a community. And I think that's one of the intangibles that, , you can't look at the numbers that I think we're most happy about is there are several of you guys out there who are taking leadership immediately off the bat to to knock down these questions and answer them. And that's great. That's exactly what we want. I think our biggest fear and the biggest fear of a lot of the of the organizations we work with is, is this going to take your whole life just supporting this? Since there is, quote, no support, are your lives going to be taken over by that? You're not going be able to write new features. You're not going to be able to be responsive to other needs. And we thought, well, this Q and A system hopefully will help with that. But seeing already this week people step up and jump in and not only just give answers, give thoughtful and researched answers is really encouraging. So I would say keep that up and, , let's build more of that. Yeah. Not to be a downer. But I mean, there is the potential to lose points too, is people if they don't put well thought answers out there, and it's just noise there, they can get downvoted. Can they not? Yeah. I mean, I don't think we're all eager out there downvoting people, but if it was , yeah, I guess it was really unhelpful? I know of nothing that's been down voted yet. No. Nothing is even close. I think it's almost more useful for people who just have a really bad attitude. Right. Because these types of places tend to be magnets towards mean, people call them trolls. I don't really that term. But people are just really negative. I think the biggest thing you should not have in this area is fear. , don't be afraid of participating. We're not out there trying to prove you wrong or we want to build you guys up. Not make you feel bad about an answer that maybe wasn't quite right. Know? Right. Yeah. You will get down voted for an incorrect or an answer that is only 70% of the way there. That's not going to happen. Right. And that's where the comments are nice because someone can say, hey, that that you're right. But here's a small little clarification at one little point. But even then, we're not we're not trying to make sure everything's a %. We're just it's almost we've we've given this toy and it's , okay, go use it. Let's let's see how you use it. On a technical note, yeah, there's been a report of some of the special characters that are getting encoded and we know about that. We're we're looking into it. And I think on occasions, we've even gone in and edited some of that stuff just because it's so annoying to us to clean that up. So Yeah. Yeah. We'll get that fixed. I started italicizing instead of putting things in quotes. So no italicizing works. And also tag your question. So questions can have tags. Tags kind of give you a topical kind of categorize your topic. So do pick a tag. We need to add more tags. We're kind of realizing that. If your question, there's really just no tag for your question, then don't tag it, obviously. But we're kind of looking at those that have no tags and either tagging it for you or seeing, oh, well this probably needs to be a new category there. But do try to tag. In addition to the Q and A site that I think we've covered here, what other kinds of feedback have we gotten this week? Well, I guess we could touch on the, the idea black box thing. So yeah, we we have been getting, some ideas or suggestions for enhancement. And although we definitely want you to keep track of those because as you as they occur to you, they may not occur to you in three weeks from now. So keep track of those. We are working on a system whereby we're going to try and collect those from you. We don't really have a great place for you to put them. We're probably gonna call this the black box for now. And, , your questions will go in and you may or your enhancements and suggestions will go in, but you may not hear about them for quite a while or ever. But we do want you to start capturing those. Again, not to say that we're going to we're going to be able to satisfy everyone's suggestions, But there could be some real brilliant diamonds out there and we don't want to lose those. Right. I think a lot of other projects, , they get these idea boards and then they become almost argument boards of other what ideas have merit and why. That's what we're trying not to have. We want to hear the ideas because that's where we get the best ideas, but at the same time not trying to argue about what strategically sense. And the cool thing about Rock is if if it doesn't make it into the core product, it's a development environment. It's it's a CHMS. Alright. It's a CMS that you can write your own plug ins in your own blocks for. So you you can write it. Or you can if you don't have development skills, you could hire a third party to write it and then it can be shared through the Rock store when that's available. So Alright. Well, that sounds a good opportunity. Although, I can see from the board behind me that we have quite a few things on the list of what we are planning to add enhancement wise and feature wise. Those great ideas that are coming in, they may be used even if you don't see them now or anytime soon. They may be just be added to the end of that list. For sure. Yeah. It's gonna be a very busy summer. Yeah. So we talked a little bit. Also, we have several different channels that we're putting information out and collecting information back. And we're interested in knowing what works best for you. What do you prefer? And we're we're looking into putting out a survey, probably sometime next week. Yeah. a a quick easy survey. Just a couple of questions to seeing how things are going. And and you mentioned, just we have all these communication mediums, , which ones work best because I don't know if we can keep them all going. , social media, newsletter, podcast, blog. Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit we're a very small team doing a lot of development, a lot of documentation, a lot of community building, and, we just need to figure out which ones work best. Can we have all those up now because we're really trying to provide you with the tools to do what you need to do and to have access to all the information at your fingertips. So in order to continue doing that, we'll wanna hear back from you. Which of those do you prefer? Great. K. Updates. We've put one update out so far this week. Right? Yep. Yeah. And we have another one coming out today, which is Friday. Not sure of the date. Yeah. Even talked about doing one possibly this past Wednesday, but it ended up not really being needed. And we don't want to be overkill because there's some overhead in, , creating an update. It takes a little bit of time for us. So we'll do them as needed, right? Yeah. But this update fixes a lot of the issues that people found in the beta. So we'll get that out today. And I think this week we have been pretty responsive to the issues, but I think we also want to make sure we don't set an expectation that we are going to do updates every week. But if something does, a breaking issue is found, will be very responsive. But we do, Emily hinted at, have a lot of features that we are working on for 1L that we are going to start tackling too. Can you just walk us through how it goes from issue to being coded and fixed to making it to an update? Sure. Just kind of walk through that word, folks. Think it is a little confusing to some. And it was even a question asked on the forum. True. Sure. When a new issue is opened, one of us takes a look at it. Then we will label it as a bug or an enhancement and confirm that it is. And then developers will start working on it. They will fix it in our development environment. And we will label it as fix for next update. The issue doesn't get closed. It is still open. And then when we package an update we test it and once we feel that it is ready to get released we will merge our development branch into a master branch. What that does is it will close all those issues that have been fixed. Once it is released, then they get closed. So if your issue has been closed, to go out and look for an update because then you can download or install the next update. You can look for it in the I mean there is a little bit of time between when it gets closed merge to master and when it's actually available on our installer. Actually, publish first and then we merge to master. So once you get it closed, it's there. David had us do it that way. Was it Monday or last? Yeah. Yeah. Our first patch People don't get notifications before they can actually go. Right. So when you get that notification from GitHub, that updates available. We'll also be working on an update or a notification system so that you can also see that there's an update available in Rock but that's coming down the road. Right. But soon. Yeah. So for now it's really social media is probably the most timely way of getting that because we don't do newsletters that often. Yeah, unless you're willing to just go and click on the Rock update button many times a week. Yep. But for now we'll let on social. Yep. I think that's probably the best channel right now. Is that it? Do we have anything else to talk about? I don't have anything else on my list. All right. Well, I think it's just time now to move from that. We had a good beta phase for this week and we're trying to get back into preparing for Rock one point zero getting back into these some of these big features. The last couple of weeks are just really trying to get prepared for the beta and then support the beta as it was released. We'll keep doing that a little bit next week, but really trying to get back more in the focus of moving on to the one. And so maybe in a future podcast we can touch on some of these other things coming down the road and we'll talk about our Peoria to Peoria? Possible. Yeah. Plan. Right. If you're interested in what is one O, you can look in the planning guide and at a very high level you can see those points that aren't green. Our goal is to get them green for one O. And there's a few other little small things that we're working on for that too. But for the most part, check-in contributions and Good. Well, big thanks to all of you, our community. You waited patiently, which is hard to do. And then as soon as beta was released, you were, you got right involved and downloaded, installed, you've been active in the community and we really appreciate it. So thanks a lot. Yeah. Appreciate it. 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.