Planning Center Blog

Planning Center Services

No spam. Privacy guaranteed. Unsubscribe anytime.

Blog

Jan 21, 2014

A Few Fun Features

I can't be the first, so let me be the last person to wish you a happy new year! To ring in 2014, I thought it would be nice to let you know some of the smaller features we've released recently. We've got some big new features coming soon, but sometimes it's the little things that make the biggest difference. Chord Chart Auto-Save Don't you love it when you've spent the last hour meticulously crafting the most perfect of chord charts, you get distracted by Facebook in another tab, and bef

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

3 min read

Nov 19, 2013

Mobile Mania, Polished Properties, and a Fleet of Features

Is it even possible to adequately document the epic nature of all the new stuff in Planning Center Services over the last couple of months? You've no doubt noticed some new things recently, but if you're like me and want to get every last bit of power out of your software, read on to be in the know of the new. Services for Android 2.0! Last week we were extremely proud to announce the monumental upgrade of Services for Android to a fully-native app! Though we did already have an app, it w

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

6 min read

Jun 03, 2013

PraiseCharts and Lyrics & Chords Page Setup

With summer virtually upon us, we wanted to usher you into sunny days with some sunny news of our own. We've got exciting music updates to let you know about today! PraiseCharts Integration! One of the best ways to make sure your musicians are prepared is to give them the perfect chord chart or sheet music. PraiseCharts.com provides high quality sheet music, orchestrations, chord charts & audio files for many popular worship songs. What's more, they often have many different arrangements

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read

May 01, 2013

Plan Contributors, Text Message Setup & More!

Happy May! We've got some cool new features we want to tell you about today. While these additions are medium to smaller in scope, sometimes it's the small things that can make the most difference in your productivity! Don't worry, we are working on some bigger things, but for now, here are the details of the latest round of improvements. Plan Contributors At the bottom of every plan is a new Plan Contributors section that will show the user pictures for anyone who has made changes to tha

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

5 min read

Feb 19, 2013

Planning Center Services

You might have noticed that the logo at the top left of Planning Center has changed. Not to worry, the Planning Center Online you know and love is still the same, but we're just branding it differently to help differentiate between our products. If you follow our Facebook or Twitter feeds, you probably saw that we recently launched a new product called Planning Center Resources that manages your church's rooms, resources and approvals. It's an awesome product that is free to use through July

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Feb 13, 2013

What was up with the permission changes?

On Wednesday, February 13, from 9:30 to 11:30 Pacific Time, Planning Center was having some issues related to permissions. What was up with that? Short answer: we messed up! In the process of making some other improvements to the site, we accidentally made a change that upgraded some people permissions. Those people all of the sudden had administrator permissions and would have been able to make changes that their real permissions didn't allow. Luckily, we caught this error almost immediately

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Jan 15, 2013

Email Status, Spotify & Custom Slide Layouts

Happy New Year! I hope you got at least a little time off during the Christmas break and you're back and ready for a great year. We want to get that year started by releasing the following updates to make things a little easier for you. Undelivered Email Status Last month we released Email Templates & Formatting which allow you to save frequently used emails for quick sending at any time. Emails are such a critical part of Planning Center so we wanted to add some more enhancements. Until

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

6 min read

Dec 05, 2012

Email Templates, Music Stand for Android, & iPad Metronome

'Tis the season of giving, and today we're giving you three awesome updates! Each update is for a different product, so hopefully there's something for everyone. Email Templates, Formatting & Signatures Communicating with your team through email is one of Planning Center's core features. Many people have different saved emails they send over and over again, so they've come up with systems where they save those emails in another program and then copy and paste them to Planning Center. From

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

6 min read

Oct 08, 2012

Signup Sheets

There are many different ways to schedule people within Planning Center. You can schedule people individually, in groups, multiple weeks at a time, and even using Auto-Schedule. All of our current scheduling methods require you to schedule people and then send scheduling request emails that they can accept or decline. Over the years we've had many requests to allow users to schedule themselves, and today we're releasing a great new feature that does just that; it's called Signup Sheets! Sign

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read

Sep 21, 2012

Media Player Update Featuring New Rdio & Vimeo Integrations!

We’re excited to announce new integrations with Rdio and Vimeo along with a brand new Media Player! These new integrations give you more ways than ever to provide legal audio and video to your users. Rdio is a music subscription service that lets you listen to millions of songs ad-free wherever you are. You can now easily link to any song on Rdio from the ‘Add an Attachment’ box on any Song Arrangement page. To play Rdio files, each user must have an Rdio subscription, which is $4.99 a mo

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read

Aug 21, 2012

Top Songs & Huge Projector Updates

*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. As summer comes to a close, we wanted to tell you about a couple of cool changes we've made over the last month or two. The first is additional functionality to our Top Songs feature that now shows more results and lets you search by title and theme to help you find great new songs. The others are some big addi

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read

May 24, 2012

Server Updates Lead to Discontinued Support for IE 6 & 7

We've always taken pride in how often we continue to add new features to Planning Center. We also love getting to use the latest technology to bring you innovative functionality. The main area where this can cause a problem is in making sure our new features continue to run on older internet browsers. At some point it becomes impractical to support old browsers, so we're giving you a heads up that we're about to discontinue support for Internet Explorer 6 & 7. Planning Center's codebase is bu

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Apr 10, 2012

A Faster & More Stable Planning Center

Over the last year, Planning Center has experienced explosive growth and increased popularity. As we’ve grown to become one of the most popular applications used by churches, our server infrastructure has been struggling to keep up. We take every outage very seriously because we know how critical PCO is to our users... we use it in our churches, too! We’re happy to report that as you were busy preparing for Easter, we were busy preparing for a major infrastructure upgrade. On Sunday night while

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

3 min read

Mar 28, 2012

Third-Party Integrations

We recently posted about our new RehearsalMix & WorshipHouseMedia integrations which are built in to PlanningCenter. In addition to our built-in integrations, there are a growing number of other applications that have their own integrations with Planning Center and we thought it would be great to highlight them here. We're working on a page on our site that will always have a list of all available integrations, but for now, here is a list of the ones we know about. For over ten years, Pr

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read

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