Sometimes, engineers and creatives create things with simplistic visions that work nicely for what it was meant to do, but in the real world is relying on some underlying faulty assumption. When thinking about our integration with family members, we realized that a good feature had a fatal flaw.

It makes perfect sense why you should be allowed to create and save family members for easy use in event registration and program check-in. However, it's not enough for just one account to be able to add all of their family members as the central "family manager", what if multiple people want to be able to actually register for accounts? Why can't a mother and a father both have full access to their household, not only to their children but to manage each-other's registrations as well? They should be able to, which is why we are introducing Connected Accounts.

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Connect Your Account

Now you can invite others to connect to your account. Share a simple QR code, link, or code, and then you can have others connect to your account! Once a connection is made, each party of the connection has mutual fine-tuned control over what they are able to see and control. You can choose if you wish to share your full profile and allow you yourself to be registered for events, for example, you can control which or all of your family members the connected account has access to. You are never obligated to give anybody full access, only precisely the connection you desire, and of course, you may end a connection at any time.

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Register for Events

If you share yourself or family members with another account, you now have full and complete "joint custody" of those associated people when it comes to registering for events. If you have family members shared with you, you will be able to register all of your family members, AND the family members shared with you all at once in one ticket. Anybody you share these individuals with will also, at any time have the ability to unregister these family members. Households now have complete joint control, if you have a house with a Mom, a Dad and 3 children, the mother and the father can independently have full control over the event registrations of all 5 people on either one of their accounts.

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Check in for Programs

For more detail on what the new feature is, see the sister blog post regarding this feature. With the addition of this feature, you can also share a family member with someone and allow them to check in or pick up family members from various programs. Now, you have more flexibility than ever to dictate your schedule, while still maintaining strict control of who is allowed to pick up your children from their programs.

We have officially migrated to Stripe being our primary source of powering online payments. Previous clients with agreements to use alternative payment processors will be grandfathered into their legacy systems, but moving forward Stripe Connect is the official way to power our online payment processing. This migration comes with many exciting feature upgrades that all of our customers will get as well.

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1. Stripe Connect Portal

Naturally this only applies for the newer clients who use Stripe Connect, but there is now a page for you to manage your active Stripe Connect connections!

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2. New Payments View

On the web and the app, the way for a client to view their online payments with us has been completely renovated. The website view is now much more mobile-friendly, there are safety features such as payment-sync requests, and a much more intuitive method to view your active donation subscriptions.

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3. Door Payment Tracking

There are now significant improvements in the way we track at-the-door payments. Events and Forms can have their payments marked as paid/unpaid, change prices on a whim, and there is an entire page dedicated for specifically viewing payments made at the door! This flexibility allows for in-person discounts to be tracked appropriately and for your financial reports to have a method of tracking your revenue from cash payments.

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4. Form Response Upgrade

Viewing a form response has been upgraded to feel much more natural, a prettier render exists now so it feels like you are looking at exactly what the user left off on. From this same integrated portal, you are able to manage any door payments.

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5. Events Flow Upgrade

There are more disambiguators now previously, so instead of only "UID"s being shown, it resolves those identities to emails + names properly, so administrators understand exactly who they are looking at. In addition to previously mentioned door payment upgrades, there are also new page views: "Upcoming Event Instances" where you can view all of the upcoming instances together, and the "Event Roster" where you can view everyone who is signed up for an event.

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6. Upgraded Financial Reports

The financial reporting system has been massively upgraded. It tracks at-door cash payments now, has more powerful tools to calculate average revenue gained or lost on recurring subscriptions, it can preserve individual payment stubs, and the exports are much improved. You can now export a report as PDF file, a .zip of various CSV files, or as an Excel file.

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7. Externally Linked Donations

We have added support for a PayPal donation button, if you have this set up already, we now have a component where you can configure the donations to point to your button ID and have your customers be redirected to your existing PayPal solution. This will not be tracked in our online payment system since it redirects to being outside of FlowStack, but it is added as an option for when you want to retain your PayPal donations.

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8. And Much More

Overall, the flows have been tightened to be a bit nicer, navigation to various screens and experiences has been improved in accessibility, and the informational displays should be more intuitive to the user. Many small upgrades and tweaks have been implemented to improve your experience, and importantly, security/safety improvements were implemented to harden our solution.

I've been heads-down this past week shipping three big updates across the platform. Here's what changed.

A Completely Reworked Text Editor in the Page Builder​

Building pages with our drag-and-drop editor got a lot more polished. The old text toolbar is gone, replaced with a proper rich-text toolbar that behaves the way you'd expect from any modern editor.

• You can set line spacing, letter spacing, and text color directly, and headings finally use that spacing correctly.
• Buttons and links work more reliably. You can now dynamically link to other pages on your site, without having the link break if you rename the page later.
• You can now add a video player or a video background to a section of a page.
• Shadow effects on boxes and sections used to be nearly invisible. Now they actually show up.

Video Library: Series, Credits, and Scripture References​

The video posts section of the admin panel has been redesigned from the ground up, both in how it looks and what it can do.

New capabilities:

• Videos can now be grouped into a Series (sermon series, teaching series, etc.) and manage them from a dedicated admin page.
• Videos can be attributed to speakers, authors, or contributors, with full create/edit/delete management.
• Attach Bible passages directly to a video post, with a proper passage picker instead of typing references by hand.
• The public video feed and the admin table both got new filters, making it much easier to find a specific video in a large library.

Event pages got simpler​

The layouts is simpler, images are handled better, and the overall page feels less cluttered that it was before.

Demo Website​

We have launched a brand new demo website that showcases all of the features of FlowStack. You can check it out at demo.flowstack-sites.com.

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Questions about any of this? Let us know.

In recent updates to FlowStack, we have made a numerous variant of quality of life upgrades we would like to share.

Broadly speaking, these cover four categories:

1. Improved Rich-Text Editor

2. Explicit Timezones

3. Bible Experience Improvements

4. Family Members & Event Registration improvements.

Let's go one at a time and dive into each of these interesting changes below.

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1. Improved Rich Text Editor

The Rich-Text Editor we currently use for editing legal notices has improved. Its context menu has been given more quality of life options for cut/copy/paste when previously the right-click menu was lacking those, you can now integrate and embed your FlowStack images directly into your text content, you can explicitly set the background color of your Rich Text, and you can more easily apply and edit your various styles in your text documents.

Currently, as stated this is only implemented in legal notices, but we hope to be able to leverage this editor in many more ways in the future, which is why enhancing the quality of life and power of this feature was important.

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2. Explicit Timezones

Previously, when you created an Event or scheduled a Notification, our server essentially inferred you were talking about scheduling an event relative to our Pacific Timezone.

This may result in negative or confusing experiences for administrators traveling outside of their timezone, scheduling an event that takes place in another timezone, or someone that is located outside of California.

By asking you directly, "Which timezone are you referring to?" for each scheduled event or notification, this ambiguity and possible frustration is removed, allowing you to have an easy and predictable experience each time.

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3. Bible Experience Improvements

Previously, your Bible Notes were scoped on a per-flowstack-experience basis. We felt that this was inconvenient to the user and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to take your notes with you everywhere you go, so now your bible notes are global across all of FlowStack, allowing you to take them wherever you go.

In addition, while the Bible was able to be read offline, it wasn't possible to be able to track your Bible Reading Plan progress in an offline state easily. To help mitigate this, we have made it possible for you to download your reading plans, so you can now update your progress even when you are offline and have your online-sync changes published when you regain connectivity.

To improve accessibility with churches who have a multilingual community, we have added explicit localized plan names, where you can select a user-facing name for any supported language you need. For additional admin-convenience, the bible plans also have internal names and descriptions, so you can keep track of the purpose of each plan internally to a much easier degree.

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4. Family Members & Event Registration Improvements

This is something we have improved upon both for our end-users and administrators managing their FlowStack site.

The first thing we would like to mention is privacy improvements. At FlowStack, we are working towards improving our site so you only have to disclose the minimum amount of necessary data you need in order to experience FlowStack. As such, you no longer are forced into providing gender or date of birth data for a family member, unless you are trying to register them for an event that is gender or age gated.

Another thing that's important is data durability and the ability for us to document and track changes to a greater extent.

Previously, when you deleted or edited a family member who had event registrations, it was difficult to understand all the remaining data and it was impossible for that family member to keep their event registrations.

Now, each event registration gives a record that records the registrant's state of their name, date of birth, and gender. This is important for a variety of reasons, but the big key is durability against event registrants being edited or deleted.

First, consider if a family member was deleted. If an admin was viewing an old event in the history they would see "Unknown Name" because the data for the participant was lost, you viewing your transaction history would be unable to know that an event you paid for was for a particular family member. These problems are no longer issues.

Because the family members data on-registration is recorded and directly attached to an event and transactions relating to it, if you delete a family member now

1. If they were registered for an event already, you don't have to automatically unregister them, this is now optional. The event saves the data associated with them so now you can at any point view your registration that still includes them and decide either to allow them to continue with going to the event or unregistering them at any point that allows for an unregistration

2. If an event is concluded or even ongoing and the family member gets deleted, an administrator viewing your ticket or overall event particpants doesn't have to worry about the identity of who actually attended in their records, because each record has its own durable mirror of this data.

3. If you want to remove a family member from your account for whatever reason, but you still want your financial history that involves them to be clear about payments made for them, now even if you delete them that record is clear in your My Transactions history.

A second key thing to consider is if a family member was updated. There is a balance to understand between allowing for flexibility, and being open for possible abuse. We want family members and user data to be editable at any time because we understand at FlowStack that sometimes, genuine mistakes are made. Names are mispelled, birthdates mis-entered, etc.

However, we want to also protect fairness in event registration, consider if somebody changes their age and gender arbitrarily to fit event registration requirements. This history is now much easier to be tracked by administrators.

Because there is a record made on-registration, any discrepancy in a user altering their information will be instantly reviewable and alert the administrator as soon as their ticket is scanned or registration is viewed by an admin. This makes it so abuse in this regard now has a chain that alerts event administrators and allows them to decide how to act on a particular piece of information like this without being left in the dark.

A third and final improvement was made:

Because each event has a record duplicated to the event, an administrator can themselves add a one-time-participant at the gate if necessary. Previously, an admin-force registration could only allow for family members that already exist on their account being added. Now, that is no longer the case. An Administrator can enter the details of who they want to let in, and sign them up for an event without any worry about if the end-user configured their account to include them or not.

Each of these improvements are only possible due to the new-found durability of these event registrants, and we believe this in of itself is a change of major consequences and will improve upon your FlowStack experience greatly.

Colors, and colors galore!

We have improved the customization ability of your FlowStack app experience in numerous ways. Firstly, the "Home Dashboard" is now significantly more customizable. The fonts, whether if the "trending" tab is included or not, and each individual bit of titling, icons, text is all fully customizable with a Google Fonts, so you can build your home page exactly as you see fit.

More excitingly, all of the app colors are now fully customizable! You can create different coloring schemes so that way your users can experience your app with your exact branding, colors, design vision and more!

Bottom line: it is now easier than ever for you to make your app truly feel like yours.

We have made important security upgrades that ensure that only people you trust can access your admin panel.

Multi-factor authentication has been added to FlowStack! You can now add your FlowStack account to your authenticator app of choice, such as Microsoft Authenticator, Google Authenticator, etc. and every time you sign in, you will be prompted to enter a secure 6 digit code to verify your identity.

This is important for all of our users that are mindful of maintaining their account security and data privacy, but it is especially important for your staff that you entrust to make modifications to your website and mobile app.

There are now security restrictions preventing accounts without MFA enabled from accessing any privileged data, or making any changes to your site. Once a user tries to access the admin panel, or otherwise interact with our server as an administrator would, if their account does not have MFA enabled they will be automatically blocked and prompted to enable MFA.

This ensures that if a third party is able to discover the login credentials for one of your staff members, they will still not be able to interrupt your ability to serve your site to your users because they will not be able to complete the MFA challenge, preventing them from causing mayhem to your online presence.

In addition, the sign-in process is now more convenient for you and your end-users, because we have enabled two more sign in providers and you can now sign in with Microsoft and/or Apple. You can now also manage all of your sign-in methods in one convenient page, where you are able to add or remove any of our 4 supported Sign-In methods that you wish (Email + Password, Google, Microsoft, Apple).