Yes it's true. Most weeks we spend our time fixing bugs, answering e-mails, playing thumb war.. but these last 2 weeks were different. We locked the doors, sat everyone down, and worked merrily to revamp your entire:

Church Calendar and Events

It really is out with the old and in with the new. New designs, new "30 boxes" month view, new repeating events system, and much more. And of course with any new development, there may be some bugs (hopefully not a lot). But if you are one of the lucky few that find one, please let us know so we can go and squash that bug like there's no tomorrow. And of course we always appreciate your awesome feedback.

So, go!  Run like the wind and post a new church event. Don't wait. That upcoming church picnic, Mother's Day luncheon, or special worship concert needs to be on your church calendar ASAP.

MyChurch shall be without awesome church events no more.

Happy Easter & Blessings Everyone!

Thank you to all who left us some great feedback on bulletins and email related stuff. During these last couple weeks, we’ve been working to revamp the inner-workings of email notifications. You may already notice a new look and feel to all the emails. But the real work was in optimizing how they are sent. And while sending 1 little email may not need much efficiency in particular, we found sending thousands of emails (sometimes all at once) were definitely posing a risk and potentially making the site slower.

So besides the new & fresh look of your email notifications, some of you will also get the benefit of faster emails. If you belong to a large church (ie. 50 or more members), you may have noticed before that certain posts (like bulletins or sharing) would take a little too long to finish. This process should clean up those posts, making them faster to load, and reducing the risk of multiple-postings.  

Lastly, we wanted to still emphasize the importance of customizing your own email notification settings. Eli made a great tutorial on just how to do this – thanks Eli! And many more of you have shared this best practice with your church members. Thanks awesome teachers! :)

MyChurch is and will continue to be a community shaped and improved by you! Thanks for playing an active part in the development process - God Bless!

One of the things we're currently working on is a revamp of our email notifications system. Many of you have given us some feedback that there are just too many emails. And while it's easy to just point you to your email notification settings page where you can turn emails on and off as you choose, we realized that a big part of the issue might be with how church bulletins were designed.

By default church bulletins send out an external email to all your church members for the original bulletin message, and each bulletin comment. When your church is 10 or 12 people, that may be okay. But when all 352 members are on MyChurch, not all of them need to be notified of every comment on the bulletin.. especially when the bulletin itself isn't urgent or that important to every single member.

Bulletins were really meant for important and time-sensitive things. Things like.. last minute service times changes, or urgent prayer requests that are worthy of actually mass-emailing your whole church. When bulletins don't fall into this category, we think the appropriate place for them is really in the blog - where discussion can happen w/o the explicit email for every bit of activity.

Furthermore, we realized church bulletins are behaving a little too much like blogs, except with the added feature of an email. So we're thinking of removing bulletin comments altogether so churches will hopefully not run into the issue of email overload (where annoyed members might just turn off bulletins altogether and eventually miss out on a really important bulletin when the church needs to reach it's members) and use their blog as the means for on-going discussions.

We'd love your feedback on this.

• Should church bulletins allow comments?
• Should there be emails for bulletins and comments?
• How does your church use the bulletin feature?
• How does your small group use it?
• And what about defaulting bulletins to moderator-only or approval-required?

We realize there are a lot of different things we could do here. But the goal is to help connect your church in a useful and effective way. We're still learning, so thank you for helping us figure these things out. We so appreciate each and everyone of you guys and gals!!

We hope you're having a wonderful year so far. Thank you so much for all your encouraging words, especially these past few weeks. We feel so blessed to get up each morning and see all your smiling faces each day as we develop the site. Yup, we're lucky folks :).

On that note, we've just added a bunch of new freshness to your plates. You might have noticed a few extra links in your What's Fresh section. The first is "the memo". This is just a first stab at it, so there will be some modifications and additions coming soon.  Memos are basically a quick note to all your friends at once. No titles, no fancy formatting. Just a fast and easy way to let everyone know what you're up to or how you're doing.

In addition, we've also added birthdays to your What's Fresh feed and created an extension page to all your items. So now going to 'all | church | friends | birthdays | memos" will give you a extended list of all the activity for each type.

Another quick feature (last one for this post) is an easy way to add a church photo to your blog. So now adding your pastor's big smile to a post is easier than ever! Hop over to a church photo page, like this, and click on the 'blog it' link in the Respond bar to open up a new post with the picture already inserted.