Podcast Episode 28: FAQ and Beta News

Description

In this episode we cover answers to common questions and what's coming in the beta 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. Welcome to our first Rock Podcast. We know there are a lot of questions about the application out there. You guys have sent some to us. We want to answer all of them and give you some other details behind the scenes that we have too. First off, let's start with some quick introductions. So I'm John Edmonson. I work at CCV. I've been here about twelve years. And I'm kind of helping with the project management and just kind of leading up some of the project coordination. But I also work on creating ideas for Rock and doing a lot of the design, the CSS and HTML work, and some coding, very light coding. And I'm David Turner. I also work at CCV with John, Primarily a developer, working a lot on coding the framework for Rock and just doing a lot of the underlying code. I'm Nick Airdo. I work at Central Christian Church of Arizona. And besides community evangelist, I do a little bit of coding, and I'll be working on documentation as well. And I'm Emily Forman. I work at CCV as well. And I recently came on board in communications to help out with newsletters, social media, some documentation, and making sure the money is all organized. So is this everybody who's working on Rock? That's a good question. This actually the the the the three of us are really the founders of the project. So we've been around working on this project for three or four years. But there's a lot of other people contributing to the project. Here at CCV, we have Mike Peterson, who's been doing an outstanding job doing a lot of the framework with David. And there's other churches too who are are doing work, over at Central. Jason contributed a lot over the last two years. We also have over at NewSpring, two developers who are doing a great job. And then Southeast also has a developer who's doing some work. So it's this isn't the whole thing. It's just we've been around the longest on on the project. So it's a pretty good sized team. Mhmm. John, can you give us a bit of background on how the Rock project got started? Yeah. So this project, even though we're getting near the the point where we can actually release it, it's been around for so such a long time. And it really started, I think, in my mind, ten years ago. David and I have been working together for ten years, over ten years here at CCV. And we've been writing software for CCV. We never really had dreams of writing full systems to manage churches. We just had these little niche applications that need to be written. And it just kind of morphed into something that was just really big. And, other churches wanted to to use what we were using back then, and and, we released that, as a commercial project project. It's now the foundation of a commercial project that a lot of people use today. And and that's great, and and and a lot of people are happy with that. But we now see that that was ten years ago. Code has obviously changed. Technology has changed. I mean, the world is completely different, and and we want to start building something new. About four years ago, kind of saw we want something new. We want to embrace some of these newer technologies. But we also have a passion for helping churches. And a lot of churches, sometimes they can't afford some of the commercial projects out there. They're great products, but at at the end of the day, they still cost money. And a lot of churches, especially small churches, they really can't afford that. So we just saw a unique opportunity to not only embrace some new technology, but then also help churches, be able to use this technology. So four years ago, we started out trying to do this. Rock really kind of was born out of the ashes of one attempt of that. So the last three years, we've been working on what is now Rock. And if I could just add to that, getting back to the history and, , open source, I would say that I probably put the bug in John's ear years ago too as I would call from the other side of the valley asking John to share some code, and he would always be very willing. This is, , eight, nine years ago. And I think that kinda helped start some of these, , ideas of sharing. Definitely. Definitely. And it started out with Rock being a church management system, but it's recently we've changed the name from Rock CHMS to RMS. So why do we have that change? That's a good question. Actually, we're a big proponent for the longest time pushing this new concept of CHMS back when there was no concept of that. And we still love that category. I think that's the best term for that. And by changing it, we're not trying to be fancy. We're not trying to be cool. We're not trying to say, no, we're starting a whole new thing. It's really something that kind of grew in our hearts. And I think it's just kind of a God direction. , first of all, I think we all as a as as church leaders, we all read articles. We all read books about how the church should, , really be the the creation and the and the and and having a bigger impact in culture, in arts and music and in technology. And and so we kinda had this thought of, , as we're working on Rock, it can be used in so many different other ways other than churches, so many different other organizations, whether they be, , para ministries or even , I think about this. I think about, , the dance studio down down the street or the swim school that's right next to it. Or basically any organization that has that manages people. ? Even I have family members who manage, groups of doctors in a nonprofit that they have. And I keep thinking, gosh, this technology and this tool is perfect for them. Now our passion is is to help churches. But why put a lid on on that software by just a name? , I kinda picture, , the guy down the street who runs maybe the dance studio, saying, , maybe one of the attendees goes, hey. My church has a software. You could use it. And he goes and tells us maybe his his boss. And it's , well, it's a church management system but, , we could use it here too. I mean, that boss can be , no way. I mean, you've already put a lid on it. Yeah. Right. Just by four letters. , so why not open it up? Why not, take that off? And and hopefully then, as all these churches, as hopefully hundreds of churches, thousands of churches start using this software, now that staff that's very well versed in the software can then go out into their community and help them use the software. I think that's very powerful. It kind of is a good testimony , by working on the software in god's name, it can be used out throughout the whole community. In no way are we backing away from churches. Right. That's what I wanted to highlight. Right. And Nick's been, , very passionate about making sure we don't get off that , it'd be easy to kinda lose Focus. Focus. Yeah. Because it , I've heard enough stories to that would show if you lose your focus on what God put in your heart to do, it will be a disaster. So we know that, and we are not going to lose focus. We're still gonna be focusing on church management needs. Right. And I think one of the things that is interesting in this project is because there's no cost for the project, there's no way of, , getting sales. , oh, there's more sales over in the in the dance studio market. There really isn't. , it's all free. So but we don't we can't lose focus. And there have been a lot of other churches involved so far, haven't there? Mhmm. Yeah. A lot of churches are asking for this. , it's it's amazing how many emails we do get on a daily basis asking for updates. But we don't wanna lose the focus on on churches and and para ministries. I mean, I think there's lot of mission organizations that could use this. Mhmm. And that's great. And in fact, we had a this isn't a mission organization, but another organization came in. They do policy legislation here in Arizona. It's basically donor management. This product is perfect for them. They happen to be a very Christian based so that, , the the church word may not scare them off, but, a lot of other places it would. So that was really the the the whole reason to change it. And I think it does also give us a better descriptor of what we work on. Church management sometimes when we when we work in church management, they, people will say, what about the facility management? I want to hook this into my Hvac. I want to be able to control, , scheduling of rooms. That's important. That's good. I'm not saying we'll never do that. But we really focus more on the relationship side. We always have working at CCV. If two features come to us in the pipeline and one is going to help understand member and attendee data better and one is going to help maybe understand , internal room scheduling for the staff. We're always going to work on the feature that has the impact to the member and attendee. And I think the term RMS, which stands for relationship management system, is a better descriptor of what's in our hearts and what's what what features are gonna get more worked on. That's not to say that it will never do HVAC, but that's certainly not on the road map. Sure. That's not the primary point. Right. Okay. So what can churches do to get ready for Rock? Well, that's a good question. I've already started working with some churches that have been asking questions. And what I've been telling them is make sure you understand how your church functions. in other words, how do people's names get into your spreadsheet or your database? Docs are documenting all those different input places, whether it's a card or some form on website, get all that in order. That's probably the first thing that will take them a while to do. Next I would say start identifying people. Who is it that's going to be the one who actually does the install? Frequently we're being asked by higher level people that maybe aren't even as technical. And they'll need to have some administrative assistant help them with part of that. So basically assembling their team. And we have a document that's is it available now, John? It will be very soon, in the next few days. Okay. So very shortly here after this podcast, there's a document on the website that we'll announce at some point where they can download this document. It's called Preparing for Rock. Read through that, understand your hosting options. Anything else, John, that I should add about? Well, I think, , the the one question we hear all the time, and we all hear this, is when will Rock be ready? And that's the wrong question. It's , when will you be ready? I mean because they they they want the date, and then they're gonna wait for the date. And that's the wrong approach. It's Nick said, get your house in order. Get get all those get that team together. Find out, well, what do you wanna use Rock for? Don't wait for the software to release and then figure out what it does. I think that's what this document's really gonna help with is just trying to give you some pre steps to kind of, , what what do you what do you need to be doing today? It'll also have , we had some questions come in, I think, too about server scaling. It's a great question. The the document covers that. It has, different scaling options for different sized churches and some and some, , server specs for that kind of stuff. So when you're thinking of getting your team together, does that mean just the IT team at your church? Is it all for high-tech people? No. I mean, certainly, you'll need the people that understand how the church works. , at Central, there was a person who when I first joined that church, she knew how everything worked. She understood all the processes, but it was all in her mind. So if that's not you, you need to partner with that person, they're gonna be instrumental in the success of Rock at your church. So I think the better question might be not when is Rock gonna be ready, but when will you when will your church be ready for Rock? Right. If if you're still in the mindset of waiting for that release date to get started, I would say you're not setting yourself up for success. I'm not saying you're going to fail, but you're not setting yourself up for success. I'm hoping this document will kind of give you the ideas of, , who to bring to a table and talk. And, but if you're thinking that, you might really definitely read the document, , and implement it and some of the recommendations. Sounds a good plan. What new technologies can we expect to see in Rock? I've been getting this question quite a bit on social media lately, and everybody wants to know what am I gonna see when it first comes out. Well, Rock is Rock's written using the Microsoft stack. So it's a C sharp application. It's using everything new, the latest from Microsoft, any framework, SQL Server, .net. But that said, I mean, I think we've done a good job of kind of looking at technologies and really evaluating whether it makes sense to use it. We're not always just chasing something because it's shiny and bright. We really filter through and look at what makes sense for us. In fact, John mentioned that Rock came out of the ashes of another application. Had started, we had gone down the road of PHP and for various reasons settled on the Microsoft framework. But again, you are not really going to see the plumbing when you see Rock. You are going to see an application that is extensible and we have tried to really make it so that it is streamlined and it doesn't really matter what's underneath as long as it's working Performance wise. Performance wise. Yeah. Some people get really tied up with that. , a lot of times you talk to, , some technology people in the church and they're , well, why you why you just use Microsoft? It's it's , well, first of all, , why not? But, , my background coming out of corporate role is very unique space. I know Nick is Yep. Is pretty much the same too. And we're not we're not Microsoft, and that's the only that's the only thing you see. We've tried other things. David said, we went deep into PHP, and we got actually pretty long ways and turned back because of some of the benefits that we got out of the Microsoft stack. So we just didn't go to it because that's all we know. In fact, I think that's one thing I'm proud about the developers that we do have is we're not stuck in in a rut. But people get really bent out of shape, I guess, when they find out it was Microsoft. And and the kind of thing I throw back it is, , if you're building a house and you're and the carpenter shows up with the tools, do you do you measure the carpenter by what tools he brings to to the site? Or do you measure by when he's done? What does it look ? And how does it work? And I think Microsoft tools are actually much better than they get credit for. I'm not a huge Microsoft fan. But when it comes to their development tools their technologies, that's one thing you have to give them credit for. They have great development tools. So I hope people will keep that in mind and really judge it on the quality of the build. Not that we show up with know, a Black and Decker tool versus a Makita or a Bosch. It it shouldn't matter. And in my mind, the the Microsoft tools are are better than they get credit for. And obviously, this answer is really focused on the developer side of the equation. And to that end we're also embracing HTML5, CSS3. And another very cool, you can call it technology, Bootstrap. We even started with was it bootstrap 2.3 or 2.2. And we took the hit recently a few months back and moved up to bootstrap three because we thought this is going to be a better place to be standing on once we release Rock. But Bootstrap three is just going to give developers just a lot of flexibility. And basically, let me say it this way, you'll be able to create things that look better right out of the box without having to because a lot of developers aren't great designers. So I think right away something Bootstrap three is going to help tremendously in that area. And if you don't the dot net stack, from day one there's a REST API that you can get access to any of the data. We didn't tack on a REST API at the end. It was baked in from day one. And we're also taking steps to make it easier for people who aren't dot net developers. So to extend or to add onto Rock, we're trying to make that, especially for a web developer, as easy as possible so they don't need to know or be intimate with the dot net framework. Right. So if PHP, don't feel intimidated. You can definitely write parts and pieces for Rock. We'll guide you into from PHP to to Rock development. Don't worry about it being a dot net thing. Right. And a lot of that, you can even do that on a Mac. You don't even have to have Visual Studio. You don't have to do it on on a PC. I mean, for the longest time, I was a % Mac, and I was still doing Rock development. Right. Yep. Sounds that is a step you guys have taken to make it really accessible to churches of all sizes who may not have the same level of development staff. Yeah. And we and we do have I mean, I'm a Mac lover too. So, I mean, we're we have the Mac love going. So what about support? How are we planning to support this application? Yeah. That's I think one of the things that kept this from happening for so long. I think it was eight years ago when I was asking John, John, , you should let, you should put this out in the wild. You should release this, this some cool stuff you got here. And he's , well, , I really don't want to have to worry about support. So we're very aware of that issue. But we also know that there's very successful models out there to follow. for example, WordPress, the blogging engine. Who supports that? Who do you call when your WordPress blog is broken? We're basically gonna do that same thing. Well, you call your technical friend down the street who knows this stuff. You can lean on the community. We're spending a large part of these last few months here creating tools, not me personally, mostly David. Tools to manage questions and answers. What else am I missing on that, John? Well, think there's two technologies or two things we hope to fill in the support gap. One is great documentation. We don't see documentation as something you just do at the end. We've been talking about documentation from day one and how much, in general, computer documentation and technology documentation stinks. What can we do about that? So we're really spending a lot of time strategizing on documentation and writing good documentation in a voice that's fun to read, but still gets the point across and doesn't insult your intelligence. , don't tell me push button one, then button two, then button three. Tell me, first of all, what does this thing do? Do I even need this function? So working really hard on that. And then we have a Q and A site in the community site to follow-up. And we are working to hopefully create an ecosystem of other vendors who, if you really want to pay someone to support this, well, maybe maybe there's a a couple vendors you could select who will come us alongside you, and and you can pay them, and they'll do support for you. The cool thing is if you if you also don't that vendor, you can fire them and go get a different vendor and use the same software. I mean, what other, , software out there can you do that with that where you can say, usually it's tied. The support and the and the product are tied and and and married together, and you can't split that. Right. And that we've even already had companies approach us to say they wanted to provide either Rock support or Rock turnkey solutions. So we know that's not just a pipe dream. And I think we can also safely say that we're not going to be providing that at the Spark development network level. So there really isn't gonna be a fear of what you've seen with some other systems where they give away part of the system for free. But if you want the pro version, you've got to pay. And that comes with support and all these other things. We don't really believe in that model. We wanted the product to be free and let an ecosystem, a marketplace develop and flourish that can provide those options, support turnkey solutions, third party development. And and really the community. I mean, the best knowledge in any product is it's inside the the the users of the product. Right? , the people on tech support usually, they don't really use it the same way. Right? They're not eating their own dog food is how we kinda say it. So Right. The the users actually know more than the people doing support. But the problem is all that knowledge is stuck in people's heads. We're, , writing these tools to get that knowledge out so you can ask questions and the community can answer them. And then everybody else can go, , read them. It's it's just Stack Overflow. It's it's what we're kinda cloning our our question and answer on. And and every programmer pretty much all day is on this one website called called Stack Overflow where they're getting questions and answers. , the other thing I'd throw out there too is, , when I talk with other churches in in in almost any organization that has software, what is the value of your support anyways? I mean, everybody complains about support, how it's not worth it. So and then really, what is support? It's a way of companies who can get money constantly from you. Once you buy the product, I mean, they need to keep the revenue coming in. Right? So it's called support. Now there's some value to that and some depending on the organization, there's more than others. But everybody complains about support and how much it costs. Mean, we doing a service by not even having support? We're taking away a cost and you're still getting the same amount of value probably. And and one the things you'll see on the website is we we don't even we try not to even mention the word support, . It's if you have a question, ask it. That's what it's called ask. And and if you wanna if you wanna know more about the product, Documentation and Learn. Right. That's a really important part. the documentation is not something that you can just not read. If you're going to be a developer and you want to learn how to do things in Rock, you really just need to pour through the documentation. And we realize that, , reading documentation can be a drag. But if you really want to take advantage of the system, you just have to do it. You're just gonna sit down and have to read. Now we're doing everything we can to make those documents fun to read and light. And is there anything else I should say about that? I think maybe some of my a few of my jokes in the documentation are being pulled out. Think a few too many of my jokes are being canceled So we might need to add some of those back. There's a good reason for that. The editing process might be helpful to the end user on this one. Well, that's where you're adding a lot of value right now. Okay. We'll see. I think, too, I mean, with Rock the documentation is not an afterthought. I mean, it's amazing how much thought and effort and even development, coding is going into just providing a valuable resource for learning. I mean, it's going to be I mean, I think documentation is going to surprise people just as much as the product. Yeah. We, for the early months, we were all using the documentation. Know, as we'd learned something we would document it. So that first version, draft of documentation we used. But yeah, it was very rough and messy. And , we're evolving that. We've done a couple of evolutions. And this third evolution will be very, I think, very clean. Definitely. When you're talking about documents in plural, are we talking about stacks of three and four inch thick books or binders? Or what are we talking about here? Let's break it down. Well, they're reusable because, , the heavier the book, the more things you can do with it that you Door stops? Yeah. Door stops keep your desk, , from falling down. That's pretty handy. Thanks. So but no. No. We actually take a different approach. We actually split our documents or our documentation into little books. So when you we go to the website, when we release the website, you're gonna see all the different covers. It's kinda walking into a Barnes and Noble when you see all the different book covers, and they all look different. So we added some life and some character to each book so it doesn't look a stale documentation. I used to work for Honeywell and we made jet engines for for, , business class jets. And we always kinda joked, and it was true. We actually shipped more documentation by weight than the engine. Oh, wow. That was all nice because it all looked the same. But was , well, how do you pick which book you're supposed to read? ? You that half the time was just trying to figure out what book you needed to open. So this is totally different. It's each book, it has a has a character and has a a unique cover. So it it's we can't wait for people to actually see it and read it. I was reading just the first book that we're about to release, The Planning for Rock, and I was just reading the final draft, , after seeing it all polished. It just read so well. I'm so impressed with what you've done, Emily, getting that book ready for for final release. I'm pretty excited about it. I'm not a technical person by my background, but reading through that book and I know it's the first one and probably the least technical, but it wasn't a difficult read for me. So That's good. I think it's good. So another really popular question we've been getting on social media and email has been, What features will I see in the beta? David, why don't you fill us in on that? All right. Well, at the root, Rock, we mentioned, is about people and the relationships between each other. So that's really going to be the primary focus of the beta or what you're going to see in the beta. You're going to see the ability to enter information about your people, their families, their relationships. And anytime two people are related, we put those in a group. So we can build on a lot of different functionality because everything at the root is a group. So person family management, group management, and then reporting on those people is really going to be the focus of the beta. But that said, there's a lot of other functionality we've we have in there. We're just not giving it the stamp of approval to say that it's, prime time yet. Contributions, check-in, content management, while it all functions, we still wanna document it a little bit better before we really say it's prime time. But I mean, for those that wanna get around and kind of look at it, it's there to look at. But primarily it's person family management reporting groups is what you are going to see in it. I think the most important thing is to realize what is it. It's a beta. So it's something that you can get started with, some things you can actually use in production, get all your people in it. But at the same time, it still is a beta. Right. So when would we expect new features to be added to, know, let's say the first we get through the beta and the first release is mostly gonna be everything that's really working in the beta. Right? Or Mhmm. And then how long do we have to wait for new features? Well, I think that's one of the the coolest things about Rock is we've put a lot of time into into the things that use your are just tacked on at the end of a project. , it has a great installer that's really easy to use. But when you're done with that, you're done. Because there's a a auto update feature built into Rock. So as new features come on, it'll automatically know that, hey, a there's a new release. It's a one button click, and you get all those features. So it's super, super easy to keep updated. And so we believe in the in kind of the methodology of release early, release often. We're not gonna bug you with, , a daily. But, hey, as soon as the new feature is ready, let's get it for you. Let's not have to wait a year, and then you get all these, , big bundle of features. Let's just kinda give you the features as it's ready. So you you can progress from the beta into version one point zero. Super easy. It's just button click. And as we get stuff beyond one point zero and and we've actually put a lot of thought. And it's kind of crazy to keep saying that. We put lot of thought on how we how we even name our releases and the generation of releases. We won't get into too detail on that, but, , we spent time thinking about these things, so that they're understandable and that they make sense and that we don't break things. , really, really worried about breaking things because we've used a lot of software in our lives and our careers where every time you want an update, you break everything. And especially as developers, that's very frustrating when you've written some plug in for for it. And now your customer updated and and now your plug in broke. Not not to say that that's a % when that's not gonna happen, but that's not gonna be intentional. , we've really put a lot of thought in the in the in the protecting not only the designers who design themes for this, but also the developers who develop plug ins. So So as a basic user, if there's an update that needs to happen, I'll be notified that it's there, and I just click a button and it happens? in the beta, you you'll probably have to go to a certain screen and and look for the update and then hit hit update. In the future, yeah, there'll be, a little notification thing that kinda, , pulses at you or something that says, hey. There's an update to kinda warn you. But we'll also have the newsletter in a in a lot of different communication mediums just to kind of remind people that the updates are there. But the the nice visual notification of an update, , may not be there in the beta, but all you have to do is go to a certain page. It will go check, oh, yep, you have an update. Would you me to install it? You hit one button. Boom. In fact, today, it's kind of interesting. We're actually making our first biggest update to our alpha release that we're using internally. The SPARC site, the Rock site are all running on Rock, which is, again, believe in eating our own dog food. So as much as we can, we're using the tools, our own tools, to run the whole Spark development network. And and how much did we learn in doing that? , just using our own tools, we realized, oh, we've gotta we've gotta deal with this and we've gotta fix that. Right. Which is really important, which is why we we definitely insist on using the software. Right. I mean, there'll be a certain cases where we just don't have that yet, that feature yet. So, , we you might see a few things that we go out and do. , initially, donations, we won't be using the Rock donations for that. That's not really a a caricature of the software. It's more about banking. Yeah. As soon as I as soon as our banking's all figured out and we got all the merchant accounts and everything ready, then we'll use it. So and and and in cases where there there really isn't a feature that it exists, we'll write it eventually. So we're really passionate about using our own dog food. Sounds delicious. It's usually not in the beginning, but it makes it more delicious for the person who gets to use it after that we have to use it. Yeah. Okay. I will take your word for that. So Rock is open source. What does that mean exactly to churches? Well I I always thought I knew what it meant. But , in talking to other people I realized I my my viewpoint was a little different. But it's it's free. So that's part of the equation in my opinion. , it's free. The source is actually available. You can go get the source. You can make changes to your version of the source if you wanted to be that brave. Of course, we'd never really encourage you to to fork the project and do your own thing. But all that source code is available. If something happens to one person, there are many other people I can step up and continue running and working this, even the organization, the Spark Development Network. It's going to mean that if you found a bug, you could probably fix it yourself. If are so skilled and you wanted to fix it this hour and it would take us till tomorrow, you could probably do that. I think that's gonna be one of the potential benefits. It's one of the things that was exciting to me when I first started thinking about this project because I've been involved in other scenarios where I saw the problem. I could fix it, but I couldn't fix it because I didn't have the source code. We also worked hard to find a very expensive I mean a very excellent lawyer. Excellent lawyer. To help us through the legal aspects so that what we provide to you is completely reusable. You could take that code and you could even create a product on it that you can then charge for. Our licensing is very open. It lets you basically do whatever you want. I mean, am I understating that? No. In fact, , funny story working with this lawyer. He's uber talented. He said this was a a unique project for him because usually in his work, people are either trying to protect it so you can't do anything with it and you can never see anything about it. Or they go the other way. I want to be so open, but I don't want anybody to be able to profit or commercialize it in any way. He goes, guys are right in the middle in strange space where you said, 'Hey, we want this to be open and we don't really care what anybody does with it. In fact, we really care that someone could commercialize this if they wanted to. We have no interest in doing that. But we want it to be so open that there is no limit on what you can do.' And, , we were talking about this with some of our interns a few months ago, and they're saying, but don't aren't you worried about someone commercializing it and then taking it away? And no. We're not. If someone wants to do that, they can do that. Is that wise? Probably not. But I think it does two things. One, it protects the church. , if we all of a sudden go off the deep end and and start having these really dumb ideas, the churches can say, no. We don't this. Let's take our source. Let's all group together, and let's do something else. So God has the ability to take his hand off this project and give it to somebody else. Easily. Yeah. Very easily. I mean, it's just a download and and you and you got that. So that that that's protection for the churches. For us, if someone wants to compete that way, I mean, go ahead. I mean, if you Good luck. Yeah. I mean, if you can do better than us, you would have done it already. Right? Right. So but then again, there's the humility part of that, too. , if we start messing up, someone else can easily take our place in running this. They just download it, rename it and and they're off to the races. Right. When I said good luck, obviously I'm kidding. What I really mean is yeah, you'll still be competing with this team. And this team, , not not including me. These guys are amazing. They're probably the some of the best workers I've worked with in my entire career. The stuff that they think of and the output they create is gonna be a challenge really to any other organization that would try and compete against this Rock team, which I'm I'm just grateful to be on. Yeah. And if if we don't if we don't raise the bar and if we if the bar gets lowered anyway, we there's still the easy option for churches to bail out on us and still keep the software, still go a different direction with it. So I think everybody, , is protected in this. But it it really rocked his world because he goes, I've never seen someone who wanted to make sure that it was as easy to steal away from you as possible. And that's basically what you're we were saying to him. And he's he was very refreshed by that. ? So he kinda said only in a church would you have that kind of, , philosophy. Let's talk about the development side a little bit. What's been the biggest challenge, Steven? Well, probably just starting with nothing. Know, just it has it's it's been what? Four years? Just just, , kind of piecing everything together. And then again, it's all new it's a lot of new technology and not just technology as far as coding languages or but just services. I mean, GitHub, Entity Framework, , we're all learning a lot through this whole process. So just, I mean, expanding our knowledge has been probably the biggest challenge. But if I probably pick one area, it would probably be the way we did reporting. We have a very dynamic implementation of reporting using something called expression queries and just kind of getting your head wrapped around that just so that it can be so easily extended by anybody was probably my biggest challenge. But it does. It's given us a way that if we don't have something you want to query on or include in a report, it's really easy to add it. And then that just kind of getting, , keeping the train going full speed is, , it's all it's all it's all been a challenge. I can see that. There's a lot of frustrations too. , in , when a when a system's already built, you're very productive because you can if you had if you wanna do feature a, you just do feature a. Now if I go to Dave and say, hey. We need to write feature a. He's , that's great. But I but before I can even work on feature a, I have to create a foundation for that feature to rest on. And so you feel very unproductive at times. I mean, there's been dips, I think, in our enthusiasm at times. Because it's just you feel you're walking through a muddy pit. And you're just pulling and pulling and pulling. And now that we're getting to the end, it's getting more productive, and we're it is starting to get a little bit more. That way, we still have, , still a lot of foundational stuff to do. , I kind of picture of it an iceberg. You get to see this the top part, but everything underneath it, you don't get to see. And so that's one of my fears actually with the beta is that when people see it, they're , oh, that's cool. It does quite a bit. But if they knew how much was underneath it and how much is gonna be built on top of that, then I think they'd be really impressed. I think they'll be impressed with the beta, but I hope they are. But Right. Because although they're seeing an iceberg, , put that on land. That's the mountain David foresaw when he first started, knowing that we were gonna have to climb this mountain. I think we're now at the point where we can all see the peak. We're starting to get to that point. Definitely above water. Yeah. But that I mean, I you forget how much work it is. David said, when you start with a blank page and, , looking backwards in other projects that we've done, it seems easier, but I don't think it was. And and the amount of time we did this was is kinda crazy too much. We've compacted in what we've done in other projects, , might have taken five, six years. And and and we have other other duties. , we're not a %, , just write, write, write. I mean, we get a lot of time on it, but there's always still the support of the ministry here at CCV that is our first I mean, we gotta get that done, then we can work on Rock. Right. And this is a very dynamic church. It's a very growing church. So So now that we're above water and we can see the peak, the next question I have is, once we're there, we we've been working for what you guys have been on this three or four years to get to that beta launch. What's on the other side? What's the future look from there? Oh man, there's a million things we probably could talk about. And then that's, I guess, back to my other comments. The frustrating part is there's so much more there under the covers that people can't see yet. , one of the ideas we'll throw out that's not gonna be in the beta, but it's gonna be soon after beta is, , Nick talked about the passion about sharing stuff. We're gonna have a built in inside of Rock. There'll be an app store. So as people write plug ins, as other churches write, , modules or blocks, they can share those blocks super easily through this app store by concept. So if you see that there's a, , food pantry block, that's not that's not something that's that we are working on. It's if a church has a food pantry and they want that functionality, they can write it, then they can share it with the with the whole rest of the community. And it's a one click install, and now they have a food pantry. And we've lived through the difficulties of that, know, we run, me and Jason, and a few others run this yearly event called Refresh Cache. And it's at that event where we I've seen and we've all seen other developers from other churches who are pretty good and they can do some interesting things, maybe it's smaller scale. But the ability to get what they've created, that fruit, and share it is just usually a challenge. We want to we aim to make that super easy so that, , with a few clicks of a button, that thing that they wrote could be shared with hundreds of churches, which I think is gonna be the power of a Rock. Right. And David and I can experience that too in working with, , other systems that we've written plug ins that we've in our freelance time, in own time, and we've shared those with other churches, it's so hard to get that installed. , we basically wrote our own, , kind of teeny tiny app store just to make it easier. And this is really going to take that concept to a whole new level. And in some of these packages, a lot of these packages will be free. But again, we want to create an ecosystem. We want Rock to be completely free to a church. But if other vendors or other entities wanna create modules and have a pay for those modules, you'll be able to get those too through the App Store. And I can't emphasize that enough. I mean, that's one of the reasons why WordPress, , exploded. That open community and people sharing made WordPress very, very popular. Right. So I think this is the best of both worlds. You you have the free, but then you have an ecosystem that, , people can make a living for this. And I think because of the freeness, I think a lot of people will use it, which which only lowers costs for for the people who want to still make a living at it. , if a person wanted to make a , if there's a a management system out there that maybe had a hundred users and person want to make a report and sell the report, well, he has to sell the report for a hundred bucks to make it worth his while. Right? But if it's a thousand user or or even a 2,000 users, he can sell it for even a couple bucks. And it's a win win. I mean, the Apple Store did that. Right? How much did software cost before the Apple Store? It was $30 was kinda the average for a cheap thing. And if you wanted something kind of medium price is a hundred dollars and it was $300 if it was now, it's , if it's not $2, , we're , what are you kidding me? Can't even pay $2 for this? I mean, it's an amazing what you get. Economies of scale. Right. And and just trying to kinda inversing the what does software cost, ? So we we hope that, , by doing this, a, a lot of it will be free. , everything everything we produce in in it for CCV is gonna be, , may not be in core because it doesn't it doesn't make sense to be in core, but we'll release it for free and through the App Store. We think a lot of churches will will do that. And then we hope that a whole ecosystem builds up where if you want a new theme, you want a new look for your external website, you just buy a theme. And maybe it's, , $20 or if it's a really, really nice one, maybe it's a hundred bucks. But it's still where if you were gonna go do that custom for yourself, it would have been $78,000. And that's probably even pretty cheap. But now you can kind of get that stuff for a lot cheaper. So that's one concept I can't wait to get out there. But there's tons of others. Yeah. workflow. I know the time David was showing me something, how he had his block connected to a workflow and it it kicked off a workflow. It was it blew my mind. And that's not one of the things we're really highlighting with the beta. So David, are you excited about that? Yeah. I mean, workflow is definitely going to have a lot of potential. It drives the check-in. I mean, the check-in is is not a fixed application that you have to stick to the rules that we come up with. It's very dynamic. And that's dynamic because it uses our workflow engine. And as we kind of extend the features for that, it's going to drive a lot of things. I mean, just being able to you can set up a workflow for when a particular field has changed on any entity in Rock, whether that be a person. Somebody changes a marital status, you can get a workflow to send somebody an email or put them in a group or do anything in Rock. It's just kind of hard to imagine all the the possibilities that we'll be able to do with, workflows. Because it blows your mind. Yeah. And especially that's out it's all pretty much there in the beta, but we we can't really talk about because there's still some UI that needs to be done. Some of the easy stuff still needs to be done, but it's all there. Yeah. But there's a ton more features coming. I mean, there's a whole vision for, , volunteer management. We have that architected, , how we want it to work, but it's not coded yet. There's volunteer management. There's event registration. There's plans for that. That's not in the beta. That's not in in version one dot o, but it'll be soon after. All these things we have to have because we we at CCV need that. So, there's a lot more coming. It's just hard not to it's hard not to have you want it all right now, but Yeah. We have to kinda ramp into that. So from someone in communications, it sounds to me if I'm at a smaller church, I'm going to be able to have resources that otherwise I couldn't afford or that I'd have to rely heavily on some professional volunteers that are difficult to find and that usually don't have a lot of time just by using this. Right. Definitely. And one of the things too is we hope to implement best practices out of the box. So you're not stuck with the blank page too when it comes to , , how do you set up your website. Day one, if you go to page one, there's an external website set up for you. And it already has A nice looking website. Right. And it and it's it's already there for you. It already has ads on it. And it and you just have to go make the changes. Another example, on the external website, when you go to the giving page, it's already set up for you. It already has text on there for you that talks about giving and the importance of, , it has ministry text about giving. Now, obviously, lot of churches are going to want to change that. We expect that. But isn't it easier to change something than it is to create something? You can take that into your stewardship pastor or whatever. You can say, here's the boilerplate. You can change the whole thing or you can just modify this a little bit. But the but the thing is it's there. I think that's what's different. A lot of products I've used in my career, they come out of the box and it's , you're just kind of stuck at looking a white screen and you're , I don't even know where you started. This we've tried to as much as we could think about the standard way of doing it. And the documentation we talk about things recipes for, , okay, groups can do a lot of things. Well, give me some examples. , here's some examples of how you might use groups for this type of bible study versus a different type of bible study. Every church does bible studies a little bit different. So we're gonna, , tell you about different recipes. Some of them may come out of the box. Some of them may not. But that's one thing we try to put a lot of thought into. Yeah. In that external site that you just mentioned, that's one of the things that's not really highlighted in the beta because we still do have to flesh that out a bit more and add some more functionality. you just mentioned the serving sign ups, small group sign ups. There's a few other big things that need to be on at churches in that boiler plate website before we can say, okay, that's beta. Right. But in the beta, can look at it. You can maybe dabble with it. , get get familiar with it because the concepts aren't gonna change. The only thing that's gonna change is, Nick said, we'll be adding more pages to that for you. And in the beta process, if you create a new theme for your external website, in the beta stage, we might make some changes that might break your theme. But know, go ahead and dabble with it. As long as you have the understanding that that might change a bit, that's fine. So, Emily, you've been asking a lot of questions, , posed by the community. Let's turn the tables a little bit on you. So you're coming new to the to to the Rock. You've been with CCV two years as of yesterday. That's right. But you're coming new to Rock and you're gonna be really helping us with communications, which is what you do at CCV and social media. That's what you do at CCV, kinda leading up that communications team. , how do you how do you see changing how what do you see coming for Rock and Spark for social media and communications? Well, there are so many exciting developments and opportunities this year, that are they've been behind the scenes so far. But now they're going to be more public, more accessible. Because it's so flexible, there so many things that, could literally change someone's ministry. So a big focus will be having frequent communication. And I know communication has been a little bit slower in the past because it's hard to talk about something that someone can't see yet that's still under development. But there will be a lot to see. There will be a lot of things coming out. We want to have, communication where we can share some of the interesting apps that people want to feature, development tips that someone may come up with, if there are experiences that other churches and customers are having, stories and highlights, all of those things will help the collaboration of the entire community that uses Rock. And I'm really excited about having the ability to share that regularly in, our newsletter which will be coming out more frequently and our social media channels for, Spark and Rock. We'll have a little more focus on Rock social media where it's been quite a bit more spark previously as we've been getting this going. We should be able to have a lot of fun on social media. We'll do some sneak peeks, behind the scenes, lot of highlights. It will be a good place to interact. And speaking of social media, we do have one important change rolling out here pretty soon. We are going to be changing our Rock Facebook and Twitter accounts to the new handle, theROCKRMS and that will be to reflect the change that we've made toward a relationship management system. We really want to use our communication to facilitate, the relationship and collaboration end of what Rock is all about. Now with those changes on Facebook and Twitter, do we need to all then re those things or will those get transferred for us or It will. I'll be putting out some communications that make it very simple. Okay. It'll tell you exactly what to do. So Awesome. Sounds good. And I think that's one thing we've really been lacking is is on the social media and the and the communication. I mean, for the longest time, I was putting out the newsletters, and it it was really something added on that, oh, I better put a newsletter out. But now that we have you, that the first one you put out is already light years ahead of what we've done in the past. And and it's so hard when you're just heads down trying to code it. It's , what do I code a little extra more? Do I write this newsletter? I'm gonna code a little extra more. ? That's just I don't really have that luxury. I don't code. So You're probably better for it. We're better for it. Definitely. We're better for it. But we should have another newsletter coming out, one more before we we launch the beta. So something I'm looking forward to. Some good exciting stuff coming up on that one too. For sure. So how can churches help? We get that a lot too. I mean, after the question of when is it ready, the next question usually is how how can it how can we help? And that question is gonna the answer to that question is gonna be different in different phases of the project. Right now, we're in a phase where we are just heads down sprinting, literally sprinting to get this this beta out. There is so much time and effort, outside of of our normal jobs, trying to get this ready. So in terms of new developers coming in or new designers helping us, at this point, we're , we can't really take on, , extra extra help right now because that really diverts us to have to go help other people, , get up to speed. In that time right now, the opportunity cost for that time is just way too valuable getting getting this done. So anybody who's interested in maybe developing and designing, what I would say is go to our GitHub page, click on Wiki, and just read the whole thing. Just keep preparing, keep looking, but don't ask questions right now at this point. We're just kinda a temporary pause on questions. Go read. Go download it. If you if you're still inclined and you still feel you got it, download it and and start running it. But try not to try not to be too, , concerned if we don't get back to you if you have a question. Just educate yourself. That will probably change later in the year, though, as as we get the one o release out. We we wanna build a community. We wanna have that understood. And we might have some, , events coming up later this year that, , we'll be at that we can, , answer questions for. So that's one area people want to get involved with is actually helping build the product. Another way that you can help is, , we've talked about some of the costs that the project has. There's hosting costs. There's our our lawyer costs. There's our accounting costs. Although I think we're kind of doing with the lawyer, but he's so valuable. He's every time I talk to him, they get so much smarter that it's it's a he's a cool guy. There's some tooling costs, things we've had to buy. Software. Yeah. ? So to date, a lot of those costs all those costs, to be honest, have been have been funded by just a few sponsors. CCV's been incredible, the support that they've given to this project. Not only are gonna use it, which is, , of course, they're gonna use it, but they've been supporting its use by other churches, which is awesome to see. Watermark, out in Dallas has helped us financially with, a donation that's been very helpful in paying some of these costs. , our costs right now are minimal. That's gonna change a little bit as we get more costs. , even our hosting costs are getting more expensive because we're actually hosting more stuff and then also Brotherhood Mutual, a very large insurer of churches has given us a very nice donation to help us, , just pay for these costs. So, another way you could help us is is by donating. That donation helps relieve the burden from a few people and spreads it across. , one of the one of the thoughts that we have as we get out there is is this building a vision on 10%. And, , one of the thoughts we have is , as you stop using your software and to use this free software, consider, , donating even just 10% of what you used to pay to help us continue this. I mean, we have thoughts too within Spark. There's some stuff we want to do for Rock that, , for example, we see, , benevolence is something that most churches do, tracking benevolence. One problem with benevolence, and if you talk to a lot of your benevolence structures, they'll have stories this, is that there are a certain number of people, they're very few, but they're there. They'll go from church to church down the street asking for benevolence. Now, most churches have some kind of process to protect against that. But one of the dreams that we have is what if what if Rock could share at a very high level some benevolence information with other churches so that when that happens, you can see, oh, this person, the same exact person has gotten benevolence at these other churches. So we, Spark, would love to put that software out for free that churches can download and put into their Rock. And there's lots of different, , other products that we or or services we'd to provide through Rock for free that we wanna get done that that that that will have money and and and costs associated with it. So we that's where we see a lot of those donations going for is this keeping Rock going with expenses, keeping the development of Rock going, but then also creating these these services that we can provide for free. , there's other service that we have in mind too that in keeping the the Rock store going. There's other services we have in mind that we'd really love to do for free and that these donations would help with. That said, if if your church really can't do that, that's fine. Use use Rock. If you're if you're a small church and you have no software, well, 10% of nothing is still nothing. So go ahead. , just use it. And if that's just something you can't push through, that's fine. , in no case do we want you to think that that you have to do this. It's just a suggestion. If you, , believe in in in kind of where we're going with the vision, then you want to see it continued. That's just, , one of the things you can do. If you can't do anything, , if you're a small church, you can't pay. And if you if you don't have the technology skills to help us, the one thing you can do is pray. And we say that in every newsletter, and we don't just mean it. , we don't just, , put, , words out there and say, well, we just just pray for us, . We really do mean it. If you look at what we're trying to do and what we've accomplished so far, it's way beyond the capabilities of any one of us in this room. The fact that where we are today is amazing. , it's beyond any of us. So, , we feel god's really leading us on a on a path. But we know that can change in our own hearts. , if if we get backwards or something, , that that could all be removed. Mhmm. So pray for us. , we we really mean that. , don't it's very common. The church will just say, oh, pray for us. , but we really do mean that. And as I've told John, stop right now and pray for a minute and then resume this podcast. Right. Because sometimes I I do that in life too. I'm , oh, I'm gonna pray for you. I mean, how many times have we done that and we forgot? , I think that's something I'm working on, but and I am trying to build systems for, but I do. I am guilty of that sometimes. Oh, everyone is. Yeah. I'm good. I'm glad. I'm glad it's not just me. It was just you and Nick. I mean, not everyone. Almost everyone. Some people are really good at catching that and, , in doing that, stopping immediately and praying, which is a good habit. It is. So those are the questions I think that we got, , to date. But I would say keep the questions coming in. How often we do a podcast is gonna be kind of dependent on the feedback we get from this one. Mhmm. If it's valuable, , let us know. If it's not valuable, I guess just don't let us know. We'll just assume it wasn't valuable. We can pick up on subtleties. We don't harsh criticism. One thing I do would say about this this podcast, we talked about a lot of things. We talked a lot about a lot of technology. If you didn't understand half the things that we talked about in terms of technology, it's okay. You don't have to understand a lot of technology to use Rock. The installer is super simple. You can do a lot of things without having to know anything about programming or web development. So don't let technology that we talked about scare you off. But do just keep in mind that as in any anything in life, you'll get out of Rock what you put into Rock. It's Rock is not some magic, , piece of software that all of and your ministry is just totally great. ? , you can just enter in really bad data and you're gonna get good data back out. It's not going to happen. You'll get out of Rock what you put into it. But you don't necessarily have to have technical skills to get something out of Rock. Will you get more out of Rock if you have technical skills? Yes. But you can still get a ton of benefit and not have the technical skills. So don't let the technical mumbo jumbo that we just talked about scare you off. It's, , we're trying to speak to many different audiences in this one podcast. Sounds good. And I know just from thinking about it from the communications perspective without the technical background, I can immediately see how this would be beneficial, in the small church world where there aren't a lot of resources. So I would second that. Definitely. Well, Emily, thanks for putting this on for us. Sure. Yeah. Thank you. 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.