The Rock homepage is the first screen most of your staff will see, so use that to your advantage. This is a great place for you to add organizational announcements, tips for using Rock and links to common resources. We've provided a great starting template for you to use and edit. Let's walk through some things you can do to make this page a useful resource.

Staff Updates

The main area of the homepage is dedicated to staff updates. This is a great place to post news items and announcements for your staff. Learn how to customize this area for your organization in the Customizing Your Rock Homepage section below.

Metrics

Below the articles in the staff updates section, you'll see the metrics section. This section displays Active Records, Active Families and Active Connection Requests. Learn more about these metrics and how to customize this section in the Configuring Homepage Metrics section below.

Quick Links

The Quick Links section on the right side of the screen is a great place to provide staff with links that your organization uses most often. For example, organizations have used this section to provide links to:

• The online catalog for ordering office supplies
• Referral lists for counseling or pastoral needs
• The organization's webmail site
• Project management tools like Basecamp or Asana
• Facility management tools like ServiceU
• Frequently used forms

You can update the Quick Links section by editing the HTML, which is accessed the same way block settings are accessed.

Active Users

Under the quick links section, you'll see blocks listing active individuals on the internal and external websites. This allows you to see staff who are currently working and individuals browsing your website. You can click on a name to view the individual's Person Profile page.

Administrator Checklist

After you first install Rock, you'll see an Administrator's Checklist on the homepage. Don't worry, only Rock administrators can see this block.

This is a list of tasks you'll want to complete before you get too far along in your Rock deployment. Once you've checked all items off the list the block will disappear, but not forever. After an update you may need to add or change certain settings in order to use a new feature, and those steps will be listed in the block. Think of it as an old friend who shows up in your hour of need (not like your old college roommate who only shows up at the worst possible times).

Be Creative

Don't limit yourself to what's provided out of the box, or even the suggestions we give in this guide. We crafted these features just for you, because we want to enable you to take what Rock provides and make it your own. Manage the content on your homepage to reflect the unique needs, resources and vision of your organization.

Customizing Your Rock Homepage

To manage the content of your Rock homepage, go to:

Tools > Content > Internal Communications - Homepage.

You can edit existing content items, or add new items, from the block at the bottom of the page. Doing either will bring you to the Edit Content Channel Item page.

Viewing Updates

Content channel updates might not display on the homepage right away. If this happens, it’s because of the block’s Cache Duration setting. If you want to see updates immediately, change the duration to “0” seconds in the block properties.

See our Designing and Building Websites Using Rock guide for more information on working with content channels and content channel items.

Configuring Homepage Metrics

Rock ships with three metrics ready to display on your Rock homepage:

• Active Records: The number of active person records in the database
• Active Families: The number of active families in the database
• Active Connections: The number of active connection requests in the database

We've supplied these metrics—which will automatically update weekly—as a way of getting you started. We encourage you to customize this section and select different metrics by editing the block settings.