Happy Summer! We’re in the middle of adding some big new features but we wanted to give you something new in the meantime. With our recent iTunes and AmazonMP3 integration, linking to purchasable versions of songs has become much easier. The other largest source of links people have been using is for videos on YouTube. Read the rest of this entry »
On June 27, Planning Center will be celebrating its 5-year anniversary! We decided that since Planning Center has become such a big part of so many people’s lives, it’s about time we had a mascot. Our clipboard logo is great, but being an inanimate object, it can’t really express the joy people get from streamlining their systems and communication using PCO. Enter PiCO, the Planning Center robot.
So many of the tasks people were used to juggling in the past can now be almost completely automated by Planning Center. In fact, it’s almost like you have your own planning robot working for you! 
Read the rest of this entry »
We just updated Planning Center with a small but significant change to permissions to enhance security. Until today, any user who had permission to edit people could edit anything in that person’s profile, including updating their email address, phone numbers and password. One of our users pointed out that this ability could be exploited. A person with Scheduler permissions could technically change the password or edit the email address of an Administrator which would then allow them to login as that Administrator and have access to things their Scheduler permission did now allow.
To fix this, we’ve made it so that users can only edit the email address, phone numbers and password for users with their same permission or lower. If a Scheduler or Editor edits an Administrator’s profile, the Change Password button is not visible, and any email addresses are grayed out and are uneditable. They can still change other information and assign Properties and Positions, but they can’t edit anything associated with that person’s login information. They can, however, edit the email, phone numbers or passwords of people with their same permission or lower, since logging in as that person wouldn’t give them any extra abilities.
Luckily, this has not ever been an issue that we know of, but once we realized it could be, we wanted to prevent it from becoming one.
April showers are finally bringing May flowers. Well, since our Planning Center offices are located in the desert, we don’t really get many showers or flowers, so to compensate, we’ve been hard at work for the last couple of months on some pretty big features that can add to your bouquet and start ours.
Positions 2.0
Setting up your people so that they are assigned to teams or specific positions can be a complex task. We wanted to greatly simplify this process and set ourselves up for some even cooler things in the future, so we’ve designed a brand new way to setup your positions. Read the rest of this entry »
Easter weekend is over, and if you’re like me, you’re feeling equal parts relief, exhaustion and wishing you could do it again. A friend of mine posted on Facebook that the week after Easter should be a mandatory holiday for church employees. You wouldn’t be opposed to that, would you? Well, we at Planning Center can’t make that happen, but we can keep doing our best to improve PCO so that your job gets easier, so today we release integration with iTunes!
From any song arrangement page, click “Add an Attachment” and then click the new “iTunes/AmazonMP3″ tab. Planning Center searches for your song in iTunes or Amazon and lets you easily link to that file. To narrow your results, try adding the artist or album name to the search to get the exact file you want. If you want to add links to the AmazonMP3 store, that has moved to this same location. To search Amazon, click the AmazonMP3 button next to the search bar.
Linking to an iTunes files does provide some benefits over Amazon. iTunes links allow you and your users to preview a 30-second sample of the song directly in Planning Center. Those 30-second previews also show up in the media player for each plan with an integrated link to go to iTunes to purchase the entire song.
If you don’t use the US iTunes Store because you are in another country, we’ve also added a new option on the site settings page to set your country. Your site owner can change the country from the “PCO Settings” tab on the site settings page.
We’ve also been hard at work improving the speed of Planning Center. We have hundreds of thousands of users all around the world, so we have started using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). The simple (but not complete) way to explain this, is that instead of all users getting the Planning Center graphics and code from our servers in one location, we now have servers all over the world. Each user is automatically directed to the server located closest to them, so it should be a little faster for everyone!
We hope you enjoy these latest updates and that you’re able to at least rest a little bit after Easter. We’ve got some exciting big new things in the coming weeks but we didn’t want to overwhelm you all at once, so stay tuned! Remember to follow us onFacebook and Twitter to always have the latest information and to share the love!
The Great Worship Giveaway
We are proud to be sponsoring The Great Worship Resource Giveaway. You can sign up to win 1 of the more than 100 prizes, but you gotta be fast. The contest ends on Wednesday! The prizes all center around one thing— creating powerful worship services. Prizes include things like:
Enhanced Password Security
Today we are releasing a small but very meaningful feature: password hashing. What does password hashing mean? Well, before this release we encrypted your passwords and stored them in our database. This allowed us to send you your password in an email when you requested it. E-mailing of passwords is actually not very secure. So with this release a couple things change:
We have some AMAZING features that are already programmed that we plan on releasing right after Easter. So hang tight!
Thanks for all of your support!
Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies.
I’ve had a couple of people ask recently if there was a way to know what songs other churches are using for Easter this year. We’ve had our cool Community Songs page for last couple of years, but it shows the top songs for last month, and by the time that page is updated, those dates are past. We thought it would be cool to be able to show you the top Easter songs being planned before Easter happens for those of you looking for ideas.
So head on over to your Planning Center Community Songs page and take a look at the top 50 Easter songs already planned for 2011. The number to the right shows the change from Easter 2010. So for example, the current #2 song for 2011, Happy Day, has -1 next to it because last year it was the #1 song and has moved down 1 spot. Any song that says NEW is a song that wasn’t in the top 100 last year.
We’ll be updating this list every day until Easter, so check back often to see the most up-t0-date list! Also, feel free to comment on this post if this is something that is helpful to you.
I’ve posted a screenshot for the top 10 songs to the left, but if you want to see the whole list, you’ll have to login to your Planning Center account to see the rest. Don’t have a Planning Center account? Sign up now for your 30 day free trial at www.planningcenteronline.com!
It’s been less than a month since our monumental Matrix 2.0 release, and we’re back with more! First of all, let me say thank you for all the positive feedback and comments on the Matrix. We love making your lives easier and having happy customers, so thanks for all the support!
We’ve got a great improvement to group scheduling, a brand new help system, and an explanation of some changes we recently made to permissions in regard to deleting people, songs and media.
Improved Group Scheduling
Planning Center has had the ability to schedule groups for a while, but there was no great way to schedule a whole team to the same position…until now! After choosing a group or browsing from the schedule a person box and clicking “Add All to Plan”, you can schedule them all to one position, or click the button at the top to schedule them all to separate positions like before.
On the left, you’ll see all the people you have selected and can hover over them to see what their conflicts or block-outs are, and remove people individually. You can even click the buttons at the bottom to remove everyone with conflicts or everyone with block-outs. When you change a Category, it recalculates the conflicts based on times assigned to that category. Here’s a link in our online help that shows you how this works:
New Help System
Speaking of our online help, we’ve greatly improved our help dialog to help you find the most common answers without having to email us. When you click the help link at the top right of Planning Center, you can now type in a summary of your question which will search our documentation and give you any potential answers before emailing us from there. If you do send us an email from there, Planning Center sends us a ton of information about your account which will help us answer any questions much more quickly. We always welcome you emailing us directly, but if you are able to use our new help box, it will help us help you faster. You can help the helper! 
I sense a Beatles song coming on.
Delete Permissions
This last update is a little boring, but many of you might have noticed some changes we made to permissions a couple of weeks ago. In the past, any administrator could delete any songs, media or people. We’ve had quite a few unexpected situations where administrators have deleted items accidentally or even sometimes on purpose that caused churches to lose a lot of valuable information, and we needed to figure out a way to prevent that. So we changed all accounts so the site owners can delete anything, but administrators can only delete what they have created.
Instead of deleting, administrators can easily hide songs and media and change people’s account permissions to disabled. This basically does the same thing as deleting them; they don’t show up in any searches, people don’t count against your account limits, but they are there for archive purposes and can be retrieved in the future. (Files uploaded to media and songs still count against your file space limits).
We still feel this is the safest way for most accounts to operate, but with this update, we’ve added a site setting that will revert your account to the old way. Your site owner can change a setting that will Allow Admins to Delete Anything. Remember our great help I was telling you about? Here’s a help article that will show you how to do that:
“That’s All Folks”
For now I’ll sign off with Porky Pig’s infamous farewell as we get to work finishing up some other great scheduling enhancements we plan to release in the weeks to come!
For the last couple of months, we’ve been working on the single biggest update in Planning Center’s 5 year history, and today is the day we release it into the wild! If you’ve caught any of our @planningcenter tweets or seen our Facebook page, you already know what it is: a completely new version of the Matrix. In case you don’t know, the Matrix shows you multiple plans side by side so you can easily plan or schedule many weeks at a time. With this update we’ve added so much more to it, we think most people will decide to do almost everything from the Matrix. Let’s dive into the features.
Real Time Updating
Everything you see in the Matrix is automatically updated live! Any changes made to any item will be reflected in the Matrix without having to refresh. When people accept or decline, a notification will popup in the lower right.
Full Plan Reordering
The songs row has been replaced with the new “Order of Service” section which shows all items in your plan and allows reordering, and even copying to other plans via drag and drop. You can add items to your plans and also edit them just like you can in plan view.
Edit Item Descriptions
The “Order of Service” section will allow you to quickly edit descriptions of any items that occur in multiple plans. Click “Edit Item Descriptions” to the very right of the “Order of Service” header, and your descriptions are shown. Your item titles are now row headings, and plans that contain that item have white cells. Click in any cell to add a description to that item. To save your changes, hit the enter key, and if you want to make a new line, hold down shift while pressing enter. If you add a description to a gray cell, that item will be added to that plan along with your description.
Integrated Songs, Media & People Libraries
Easily search, filter, and drag from the new library sidebar directly to any plan using drag and drop. Hovering over an item in the sidebar will show a hover card with more information for that item, including the date last used & preview images when available. The Hover Cards also provide links to the original library items so you can edit them quickly.
Song Hover Cards show bpm & song sequence, and also arrangement names & keys which you can drag to your plans so you don’t have to choose those details later. The songs library sidebar will also stream the mp3 or m4a which was uploaded first.
Intelligent Loading
Depending on where you load the Matrix, it automatically chooses plans for you. Load the Matrix from any plan, at the bottom of any service type on the main plans page, or by clicking the new Matrix button when you hover over a plan in the plans list, and the Matrix will load 1 previous plan and the next 4 plans from that service type. Load the Matrix from the top of the main plans page and it will load 1 plan from each service type you see on that page.
You can change the default number of plans the Matrix loads per service type, by editing your service type properties.You can also change the the number of plans loaded for a folder by editing the folder properties.
To load new plans, click the “Load A Plan” button at the top right of the matrix. Plans already loaded are shown in gray. To remove a plan from Matrix view, hover over its title and click the gray x.
Printing & New Custom Reports
You can print the whole Matrix or even individual plans. To print individual plans, hover over that plan’s title, click the print icon, and then choose from the same options you have in plan view.
To print the Matrix, you must use a report. We’ve redone all our Matrix reports and have included new functionality that makes it even easier to print without having to modify any of the reports. The default Matrix report and the People Calendar report default to only printing expanded categories. This allows many people to use the same report for different uses. Whatever you have visible in the Matrix will print, and whatever is hidden will not.
The Planning Center Development Team
I’m sure there lots more I haven’t touched on, like emailing your people, for example, but you’ll discover more as you use it. I want to take a second and acknowledge the amazing work of our development team, Jeff Berg & Scott Motte, our programmers, and Shane Armitage, our designer. These guys are incredible at what they do and toil endlessly to make every little detail perfect so you can have a more productive and even fun experience using Planning Center. Being in ministry, you know what it’s like to put your heart and soul into something, so if you have a second, give these guys a shout out in the comments below.
Check out this quick video introduction to the Matrix by Jeff Berg, our Owner and Lead Developer
Or check out our detailed video tutorial
We hope you love the new Matrix and thank you for letting us be a part of the great ministry you are doing!
First of all, let me start of by wishing you a happy new year! Now that the best and busiest season for churches is over and you can breathe again, we decided we should reward all your hard work with the first PCO update of 2011!
Lyrics & Chords 2.0
Planning Center’s built-in Chord Chart transposer (on any Song Arrangement page) has gotten a big update and has been renamed “Lyrics & Chords”. The obvious addition is extended support for lyrics. If you put in lyrics with chords, Planning Center will make a chord chart PDF and an optional lyrics only PDF. If you input lyrics without chords, you’ll only get the lyrics PDF.
We’ve also rewritten our chord transposer to allow mid-song key changes and to permit any chord in any key.
In addition, we now support the Chord Pro format which allows you to attach chords directly to syllables for more consistent output. Type your chords between brackets right within the lyrics and use the new line preview to see exactly how it will print.
Planning Center also recognizes common song section headings and will apply special formatting. [Verse] or [Chorus] for example.
If you use our advanced “Attachment Types” feature, you can also link any attachment type with Planning Center’s new Lyrics PDF, Chord Chart PDF, or Capoed Chord Chart PDF. The site owner can do this from the site settings page by editing Attachment Types. This allows you to have the Capoed Chord charts, for example, only appear for people scheduled to the Acoustic Guitar position.
Song Sequence
For each song arrangement you can now specify a sequence which is visible from plan view and is a new print option. In plan and print view, many of the sequence sections are abbreviated (Verse 1 becomes V1). You can also add your own custom sections at the bottom of the list.
For any of you wanting to add the sequence to your custom reports, use item.arrangement.sequence, and use item.arrangement.lyrics to add the lyrics.
Sequences aren’t linked with our Lyrics & Chords feature, but we hope to do some fun things in the future.
A Little More
In the midst of all these other changes, we’ve also squeezed in 2 more. Until now, anywhere you did a search for a person, you had to had to type it “First Name, Last Name” or just “First Name”. Now you can also use “First Name Last Name” and find the person you are looking for even easier. We’ve also added the ability to filter by permissions from the main people page.
Our Team
And now an exciting announcement (for me at least) that has nothing to do with new features. I (Aaron) have been working part time for Planning Center since I helped Jeff start it over 5 years ago, but my full-time job was as the Music Director for Central Christian Church in Las Vegas. As of January 1, I’ve swapped those roles and am full time with PCO and part time with my church. It was a difficult decision, but I’m very excited to continue to be deeply involved in music ministry at Central, while being available to put more time and energy into the development of PCO.
Speaking of new team members, we are looking for an awesome Ruby & Javascript Developer, so if you want to join me and the rest of our amazing team, click the blog post for more info.
Only the Beginning
That about does it for now, but there is an even bigger update right around the corner that I can’t wait to roll out, just ask my friends Neo, Morpheus and Trinity.
2010 was a great year for us at PCO. We gained some great new team members, added tons of new features including Planning Center Music Stand with our first iPad app, and made Planning Center even more powerful and easy to use by redesigning half of the site. We love helping your ministry be on the cutting edge of technology & organization and look forward to pushing it even further in 2011!
Aaron Stewart
Product Manager
planningcenteronline.com
