Question

Photo of Alex Lam

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Collaboration on Development

1

Hi RockRMS team,

You've got a really solid and exciting system here. I'm from one church, Kingdomcity with locations in Malaysia, Australia, Singapore, Cambodia, Philippines, Botswana & Dubai.

We have been using Salesforce for our backend for the last few years, but we realise it is not particularly scaleable in costs for the next century. With the radical growth of the church, we need to either develop a tool in-house, or work with / contribute towards a tool where we have the ability to have the source code and chart our path. Rock RMS seems to fit this profile quite nicely, as it will greatly reduce the initial development time.

We are potentially going to hire a couple of full-time developers and we'd like to know how we can best work together on understanding the Rock RMS development roadmap, mapping our needs against what has been developed and also contributing towards the greater good of the platform and its modules. How is the culture of development / communication between the various contributors that we see on GitHub?

We haven't hired the developers yet, but we're wanting to understand the existing pool of resources available. Would it be better to have one developer and a UI/UX person, or two developers?

I'd love to connect for a discussion on this as there is a Systems Summit in Perth happening in mid-December and we'd like to present a proposal on the way forward.

Thanks.

Alex Lam
Communications & Systems Consultant

  • Photo of Nick Airdo

    1

    Greetings Alex,

    We're glad to hear Rock is potentially filling a need you have as you look to move off Salesforce.

    For the most part, much of the collaboration happens on either the #develop or #plugin-discussion channels on our Slack (www.rockrms.com/Slack).  With the core team being so small (and underfunded at the moment; see the Donate page :) there really isn't any available time to try to coordinate development of various other church's concerns through the core team - outside of the two mentioned places.

    Regarding the skill-sets for your developers... besides strong .NET/C#/WebForms/HTML/CSS skills, having a person whose only concerns are UI/UX may be fairly wasted in an environment like Rock.  Since we advise developers to follow the existing UI/UX patterns wherever possible there should not be too much 'invented' UX to be recreated. Additionally since use Bootstrap 3, a large part of the UI styling comes from there (with the ability to override or create custom themes as needed) and so Bootstrap's common 'framework/language' allows developers to not have to worry too much about UI by just following Bootstrap's guidelines.

    Good luck and many blessings to your team and your efforts at the Systems Summit!

    In Christ,
    Nick