What’s new in HoW

Visitors pay for events and buy from your shop without an account

Visitors to your website can now pay for a paid event, and buy from your Shop, by card without making an account; the money goes to your own Stripe account and the order or place shows up in HoW as usual.

Text us on your church's website

Visitors can now text you from a button on your website, and you answer them from your texting Inbox; turn it on in Communications, Text us.

The Revival website theme

A new included design for your website, with big centred headlines, rounded photographs and a header that stays in view; choose it in Website, Look.

A Shop page on church websites

Visitors can see what your church sells on your website and buy it in the member portal after signing in.

Move between the staff dashboard and the member portal without signing in again

Staff who are also members can switch between the two without a second sign-in.

My schedule across churches

Volunteers who serve at more than one church see all their dates in one place, and can let you know when they're already busy elsewhere.

My schedule moves to the member portal

Your volunteers find every serving date, at every church they serve, under My schedule in your member portal.

Scheduling is now called Services

Scheduling is now called Services. Nothing else changed: your plans, positions, seasons and people are where you left them.

One email has staff access at one church

A person who works at two churches uses a different email at each, and each church's staff screens stay with that church's own logins.

A church's staff screens open one round trip sooner

One address for the staff dashboard

Staff sign in once at login.how.dcxlogic.com and switch between their churches without signing in again.

A form sign-up that matches someone confirms by email before anything changes

When a sign-up on your website matches someone you know and gives new details, HoW emails them to confirm before changing their record, as Planning Center does.

A sign-up matches or creates the person

People who sign up on a form with a consent box are added to your people, or matched to their record, by themselves, and you only decide the ones HoW isn't sure about.

Custom domains reach production

A church on HoW can put its website on its own address, such as www.theirchurch.org.

The inbox says what's missing when you can't answer

You can now see why an answer can't be sent and what to do about it.

Your campus in the member portal, and a page for every campus on your website

Members choose their campus and see what's on there first, and each campus has its own page for visitors.

"Was this article helpful?" on every help article, What's new, a sitemap, and help for getting started, people, groups, events and check-in

Every help article now asks whether it helped, What's new lists the latest changes, and there are new articles for getting started, people, groups, events and check-in.

Check-in: set up rooms from the dashboard

A Rooms tab beside the door on Check-in lists, adds, edits, archives and restores the rooms children check in to: name, youngest and oldest age, capacity, order and, in a church with more than one campus, the campus.

Sermons and media

Put your sermons online, with series, speakers, notes, video and audio, a sermons page on your website, a podcast for Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and a Sermons page in the member portal.

Team: suspend or remove a login, and invite with roles

Reports are active

Stripe events are never lost; idempotent Stripe writes; refunds serialized

A payment is confirmed even when Stripe is slow to tell HoW, and two refunds of one payment can never both go through.

The texting inbox sends its answers

Team: build custom roles, give roles, and limit staff to campuses

The staff dashboard gains Team with two tabs.

The Reports screens: attendance, participation, registrations, messaging

The staff dashboard gains Reports.

Everyone on staff sees the church's time zone; only the owner changes it

The staff dashboard's Home church card now reads Church time zone with the zone and its time there now ("America/New York — 10:42 AM there now", kept current each minute), in place of the raw zone name.

Archive a volunteer season, or delete one made by mistake

Scheduling gains Archive season: the season leaves the season picker and volunteers' Serving page and home, keeps its plans, requests and answers, sends no more requests, and can be opened read-only from Archived seasons (n) and restored.

The texting inbox's screens

Membership is active

Both halves have shipped: the staff's pathways, steps and standings, and the member's "Where I am" on the portal's Home.

Campaigns say clearly when people can't be reached

The pilot's first text went to an audience of one with no phone: the list said Sent, and the report said otherwise only in small dimmed text.

Merging two people moves everything

Scheduling grid actions say why when they are refused

Communications managers manage email senders

A blockout lands on the right day at a campus in another time zone

A service is now checked against a volunteer's blocked-out days on its date at its campus: the campus's time zone, else the church's, the rule every date in Milestone 3 follows.

A season's dates no longer show a day early in the Americas

"Allowed to collect" shows on the records the database counts as a child's

A blockout lands on the right day for evening services

Live now: a countdown, every Planning Center provider and Facebook, YouTube handles, a replay window and campus time zones; help articles for church staff

The church's time zone can be changed: by the owner, and by DCX support when a church calls

The Live now block, switching at the second

Church pages can no longer be framed by other websites

Church pages are served from memory, and scheduled blocks switch at the exact second

The schedule's date headers and the Often badge

The page editor: drag to reorder, Move to top, and scheduled blocks

Custom domains: the church's screen and DCX Logic's

A church chooses its website's theme, with a preview, by plan

The Editorial theme

Plans: Core, Pro and Elite

Joining by text links the sign-up to the number

Settings → Messaging: DCX Logic runs texting, the keyword and the Messaging Service on screen

Add this person from a form submission, with the consent it gave

Staff retyped a sign-up's name, email and number and its text-message consent by hand; the pilot page and every Connect form depend on this step.

A hand-over can be undone

A mistaken click, the wrong person's add-ons, or an item not collected after all no longer leaves an order marked picked up for good.

Settings → Payments says what Stripe is waiting for

After Stripe's form, the card showed "Needs attention in Stripe" even while Stripe was only checking.

The HoW logo heads every app

The member portal, staff dashboard and control plane showed the word "HoW" as a heading in a row with the app's badge and the church name.

Staff and member screens open about twice as fast

The member portal works by keyboard and names what it does for a screen reader

Every text says who is texting and how to stop, and HoW publishes its SMS program

Hand over an event's add-ons from its roster

Add-ons are handed over at the event, where staff have the event open, but until now they could only be marked in Store → Orders.

Volunteer scheduling is active

Care's "Close" is now "Close request…", so it cannot be mistaken for closing the drawer

The Store can be used by keyboard, and says what it does to a screen reader

An order's "Paid" badge is readable in the light scheme

A member's add-ons say which event they are for

Search boxes keep every letter typed

The Shop's heading follows the church's choice

The store, step 4: HoW's store, Shopify, or none

Store → Settings → Where members shop lets a church keep HoW's store (the default), send members to its own Shopify store, or have no store.

The store, step 3: event add-ons

Staff choose an event's add-ons from the catalog in the event's drawer; a product made only for an event (a meal, a camp extra) can be kept out of the Shop.

A place registered again after a refund is a new payment

The store, step 2: shipping, and the sales-tax switch

The store, step 1: products, orders paid through the church's Stripe, picked up at church

Staff get Store → Orders (to hand over, mark picked up, refund, cancel an unpaid one) and Store → Products (options with their own prices and stock); members get Shop in the portal with a cart, Pay, and Your orders.

Refund amounts, store prices and event prices can be typed again

Email through Resend, senders as in Planning Center, and HoW's own unsubscribe link

Staff refund a paid registration from the roster

A weekly run keeps its wall-clock time across a daylight-saving change

The website's registration form no longer says whether an email address is registered for a date

A second registration with the same address is answered as if it succeeded and writes nothing, the way the honeypot is, so a stranger typing addresses learns nothing and a visitor who registers twice loses nothing.

A person who already has a portal login is never moved to another one without being unlinked

Inviting a person who was already linked used to re-point them to the new login silently; the invitation's pre-check now refuses them before any email is sent ("This person already has a portal login.

Paid event registrations

Stripe Connect onboarding

The Communications screens

Audiences

A saved definition, re-resolved every time it is used: filters over tags, home campus, group membership (current season), membership standing, household role and custom fields, combined with "and".

Who may collect a child

Members of a group see each other

An active member sees co-members by name on the portal card, adults only and never a child; a group marked members are confidential shows only the leaders.

A visitor registers for a church's event from its website

Care requests

Membership pathways

Serving in the member portal

Scheduling: the staff grid

Staff link a person to their portal login from the person record, and invite them in one step

The record's new Portal login section says whether someone can sign in as themselves.

The station suggests the right room

The check-in station

Deleting a template, an audience or a person no longer fails on Communications' references

HoW keeps its own record of what fails, and shows a reference to quote

Groups: the member's half, and the website finder

Groups in the staff dashboard

The member's own record: portal self-service

Campuses: a church's buildings are records now, not paragraphs

Every number on "Who we can contact" opens the people behind it

People → Who we can contact

How much of the church each channel can actually reach, and why the rest cannot be.

The standard theme

Church websites are designed rather than merely structured.

Four palettes and three typefaces

Quiet (the default), warm, black and white, and dark; Inter Tight, Plus Jakarta Sans and Archivo.

Menus and the image library finish the content editor

A church builds its header and footer under Website, Menus: each item is a label plus one of its own pages or an address, with one level of children, and nothing reaches visitors until it is published.

The hero block's image was collected but never drawn

One bad import row no longer stops every church's import

A church page shared as a link now shows its description