The Open Source Church

Well it has been a little while since we have had any posts here. But believe me that is a good thing. We have been working hard on the Open Church Manager, and it is coming along nicely. It will be ready for beta release and testing toward the end of June, so keep those eyes peeled.

As promised Here is what we have in the works for you here at The Open Source Church:

• THE OPEN CHURCH MANAGER: This is going to be our flagship offering. It is being developed as a web application for all aspects of Church Management. Some of the features will be:
  • Membership Database: complete with contribution tracking, mapping, and standard database features.
  • Check-In System: This is a system that can be used to check in your kids church. It will feature the ability to notify parents via SMS and bar coded label/badges for the kids.
  • Group Tracking/Attendance: Need a solution to track attendances? This is it. Track your small group attendance, your Worship service attendance, or any other thing you want to track.
  • Email Marketer: Performs the same functions as a lot of the other cost based Email Marketers out there.

  Any other features that I did not mention that you might like to see? Let us know and we will take a look at it.

• Church Website Builder: I am not about to try and reinvent the wheel so this is just going to be a pre-packaged Drupal install. Why Drupal? Because in my opinion Drupal is the Best CMS on the market.
• We can also custom code solutions for your church as the need arises. Who knows we may already have a solution available to help you. Just ask us, it can’t hurt.

That is a look at what we have coming up. Our current Time schedule to the beta release of The Open Church Manager, is about three months. If you are interested in signing up for a beta account when we go live, or if you are interested in helping develop the project please visit our contact page.

Just wanted to highlight a few favorite Technology Resources for you guys.

Internet Filter

-You may have heard of this before but just wanted to share one of my favorite ways to provide content filtering is through OPENDNS. It is a great resource for content filtering and even moderate network monitoring. Check it out.

Office Software

- Now I would hope that you have heard of Open Office. But if you haven’t go get it. It does everything that MS Office can do and best of all it uses the open document format, which if you haven’t heard is kinda a big issue right now between the like of Google and Microsoft. Check it out,and better yet start using it.

Portability

-Ever wish you could take the programs on your computer with you to whatever computer you use. Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of
your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any
Windows computer. All without
leaving any personal data behind. This is the leading use for my thumb drive. Yeah sure I use it to transport files every now and then, but I love being able to take my the apps that I use the most(along with all my settings) with me to other computers. Check it out.

Have a great day!

“The world would be a better place without Internet Explorer” - Terry Storch(Head Tech Guy @ LifeChurch.tv)

His Original Post 

This is the most true statement I have ever heard. I  very much dislike developing for IE. But nonetheless have to due to Microsofts total domination(eghhh). Good news though Firefox is getting more popular and is now at about 36% usage I believe. If you are still using IE, well I have two words for you…

GET FIREFOX