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Mar 21, 2012

RehearsalMix, WorshipHouseMedia & Top Songs

One of the best ways we can add functionality to Planning Center is by integrating with great companies & products. Today we're really excited to let you know about an awesome new song integration and one greatly improved media integration. In addition, we've removed the Community Song & Media pages, enhancing and incorporating some of those features into other areas of Planning Center. RehearsalMix.com is a brand new service that takes the original recordings of your favorite worship songs and

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

5 min read

Feb 27, 2012

Email & Reminder Improvements

Over the last couple of weeks, we've been rolling out some cool changes and additions to emails and reminders. Today we've added even more and wanted to make sure you know everything that's new. New Email Design Our emails have looked the same for many years and when we updated the look of Planning Center in January, we knew that emails needed a new look as well. Those are live as of right now and should provide a more cohesive experience. It should be easier to see your scheduling detail

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Feb 03, 2012

Our Recent Server Woes

You may have noticed that our site went down a couple of times this week. Since 'Online' is 1/3 of our name, we take site availability extremely seriously around here. We are normally very proud of how stable Planning Center is, so having multiple issues in a week hits us strongly in the gut. We know how much our users trust and rely on Planning Center, so we want to be upfront with you on exactly what has been going on. One of the biggest new features in Planning Center's January 16 release

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Jan 03, 2012

2011: 525,600 minutes of PCO

As I'm sitting here on my first day back to work in 2012 (I'm choosing to call it twenty-twelve, not two-thousand-twelve, by the way), I'm reflecting back on what a great year 2011 was for PCO and thought I should write a quick post overviewing a lot of the great and memorable stuff that happened. New Peeps The first thing that came to mind for me was that after helping co-create PCO with our amazing owner & lead developer Jeff Berg 6 years ago, last January 2, I finally became a full-tim

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read

Dec 12, 2011

What's New in Planning Center's New Look?

We've been hard at work for many months now completely overhauling most of Planning Center. This overhaul not only includes a brand new design, but technology enhancements that make more things possible. In the process, we've added a ton of new features that should make it easier and more enjoyable to use. Here's a list of most everything that's new. Click on any image to see a larger version. Dashboard My Schedule All users now have a My Schedule section at the top of their dashboard

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

6 min read

Nov 21, 2011

iOS Media Player update, take 2

For a long time we've been anxious to allow our mobile apps to load your audio playlist for easy rehearsing instead of manually having to navigate to each mp3 separately. There are many different mobile platforms, so we looked for a way to make one media player that would work across iOS, Android, and other devices as well. We spend a considerable amount of time making that work and were pretty happy with the results. We updated the app and thought everyone was going to be excited. Little did we

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Nov 17, 2011

PCO Facebook App Gone and Back

A couple of years ago we developed a cool app for Facebook that allowed you to access your schedule, get notifications and do some other cool things with your Planning Center account right from Facebook. For a while it was the only way to see your entire schedule if you had PCO accounts across multiple churches. But then a year or two ago, Facebook decided to make a big change to what developers were allowed to do. We were no longer able to actually send users of our Facebook App any kind of mes

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

3 min read

Nov 16, 2011

Music Stand Update with Wireless Display

Planning Center Music Stand 1.5 We're excited to announce the release of Planning Center Music Stand version 1.5. Music Stand connects directly to planningcenteronline.com to turn your music sets into a digital music stand. Open the Music Stand iPad app, select one of your dates, and your PDFs are loaded and ready to go! We've added quite a few great features recently, including background audio, but the exciting thing about this release is support for an external display using AirPlay. If

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 19, 2011

Mobile Media Player & Attachment Types

Mobile Media Player Two weeks ago we released an update to our mobile media player that plays all of your plan mp3s in succession! In the past, you had to manually navigate to each mp3, but now the mobile media player will automatically advance to the next mp3 when it finishes playing the current one. You can access the mobile media player from the button at the bottom of the Flow tab, or by going to any song and selecting an mp3. Improved Attachment Types Attachment types are used to

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

3 min read

Sep 13, 2011

SongSelect by CCLI Integration!

We're very excited to officially launch our SongSelect by CCLI integration today! We've been beta testing this for the last couple of months to make sure everything would work smoothly and today we are finally all-systems-go. If you have a SongSelect membership, you will now be able to import Lyrics and Chord Charts directly without having to download it from SongSelect and then upload it to Planning Center. It's now a 1-click integrated process that will save lots of time! To take advantage

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Jul 07, 2011

Scheduling Preferences and more!

Two months ago when we released Positions 2.0 and Auto-Scheduling, I mentioned that those features would make way for even more cool stuff down the road. Well here at the Planning Center offices we've been walking down that road since then and are happy to release the first new addition: Scheduling Preferences. Every user now has the ability to set preferences for how often they'd like to be scheduled. This can be set globally, which will apply across all service types in your account, or sep

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

3 min read

Jun 21, 2011

YouTube Integration

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. Many people link to song videos for rehearsal purposes, videos of their live services for review, or instructional videos. Whatever your purpose, we've added a great new YouTub

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

May 13, 2011

Permissions Upgrade for Enhanced Security

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

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

May 04, 2011

Positions 2.0, Auto-Scheduling, & Last Scheduled Options

*This is an outdated blog post and the information here may not be current. To read more about our recent product and company updates, please visit https://www.planningcenter.com/blog. 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. Posi

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read