Hard to believe, but I've been working on this Rails app for over 7 years now! It started as a Rails 1.0 app waaayyy back when, and I've managed to bring it along through almost every major Rails version (still working on updating to Rails 4.1), which I'm pretty proud of.<p>You can see screenshots at <a href="http://church.io" rel="nofollow">http://church.io</a>.<p>Being specifically church software, it might not find much of an audience here on HN, but still, I'm proud, so wanted to post about it.<p>Keep inspiring HN!!!
This is really nicely done. My parish seems really fond of phone services like CallingPost; you might be able to do some integration with Twilio to annoy other church people the same way. :)<p>You might also consider an explicit obit feature, along with explicit features for weddings and baptisms, since those are the big "out of process" services (at least in Catholic churches) that need announcements.
Beautiful UI! Let me bring attention to one thing that's a bit tangential - I see that you have a "church directory" function. Please make sure that proper privacy settings are in place and people are prompted to opt in rather than are opted in by default. Especially in this case, registers for places of worship have been historically used to target minorities for their associations, nationalities and beliefs. Not saying this would happen in the US anytime soon, but better safe than sorry in my humble opinion.
This is really nice, I've often wondered about the dearth of such things every time I look at a church website.<p>In the Catholic churches in my area, the company that prints the paper bulletin appears to also have something to do with the web hosting as well. I think many of them just go with that and slap something up there.<p>Have you thought about actually using it to build a full-blown SaaS offering that churches can subscribe to? Similar to the WordPress model? There are a ton of Churches who probably would have someone who can set up a website, but not necessarily do the whole Digital Ocean VPS thing. I haven't explored this space, but I'd bet this is one of the nicest looking things like this out there.
Great work! I've got a RoR church scheduling system I've been hacking on for 4 years off and on (mostly off). In a weird twist of fate, we've used the exact same bootstrap template, although I colored mine purple. Going to have to look into integrating my system into your software, since you've got some abstractions and models that I need but have not yet implemented (families, for one).
This is the most unlikely but deserving post to spend all day atop HN. Great, great piece of software, deserving market, it's just great. Our company was originally started to serve my co-founders church as well believe it or not (the church was worried that credit card fees were usurious and so he tried to build a solution). I hope you do commercialize it purely because it will spread and serve more people that way - doesn't mean you need to try to make a lot of money on it, but some level of commercializing helps sustain and spread a project like this.
I myself am not blessed with the gift of faith, and I don't particularly enjoy Rails, but I greatly appreciate your making your very mature passion project available to one and all. Very impressive!<p>I enjoyed: "It's like a cross between Facebook, Google Groups, and SharePoint, but it's completely free and open source and awesome." I especially like that it's awesome in addition to being completely free and open source, rather than _ just because_ it's free and open source.
This looks very nice. I'm the technology director for a Catholic college prep school and we have been wanting to put up an online alumni directory, but the commercial packages we've seen are too expensive for our small school. I'm thinking your software could be adapted for that purpose, so I will show it to the lady who runs our web site and see if we can use it. Thanks for sharing your work with the world!
Nice app! Good to know there are other Christians here in HN. :P I've always thought about building something similar. Maybe I'll contribute, but my Rails skills is quite lacking (read: non-existant, I'm a C# guy)
Why can't a church use a general purpose social network framework? How are the constraints/feature-needs different for a non-church group?<p>I'm asking from a place of honest curiously. Could a non-religious community group use this? Could a church get by with a social networking tool built for non-religious groups?
This is great! Are you aware of The City (<a href="http://onthecity.org" rel="nofollow">http://onthecity.org</a>)? Many churches pay $100/month or more for their similar, hosted solution.
Have you got a demo site where somebody who's interested can log in and play around with its features? Two feature questions I can't answer by looking at the screenshots:
(1) Does it have a way to highlight "Mass times" (or whatever), or is that just thrown into a general calendar with all the other events?
(2) Does it have any way for the pastor to post messages to the front page in a prominent way, or is his user account just another user account?<p>It looks outstanding -- keeping my eye on it.
This looks simply fantastic. You clearly put a lot of thought into making it accessible to the non-technical user which means you really know the audience.<p>Kudos to you on taking a passion project and turning it into something wonderful and sharing it with the world!<p>(I'm also glad to see so much positivity in a thread that could have gotten gunked up. Just because something isn't your thing doesn't mean you can't appreciate a craft)
This is great stuff, how do you "market" it? There are generally not a ton of tech people at smaller churches and then at the larger/mega churches, they have entire teams, which IME, love vendor software vs roll your own.
Our church has members from age 0 to 80. Some of the oldest members have never used a computer, but we'd want to include their pictures in a photo directory. Does this software support adding pictures on behalf of someone? Can you designate "editors" or some lower-level admin ability for that?
This looks very nice. Maybe an Events feature? Maybe a backend admin type thing that can track offerings people are making, and then also a way to make an offering through the site if you can't make it into church that week.<p>Really nice though, great work!
Great work! I've been watching from the sidelines, and I'm glad you finally had a big public launch! OneBody looks really good from the screenshots.<p>I started <a href="http://www.churchmint.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.churchmint.com</a> over 2 years ago, and I have not made any progress for a while now. Seeing your success and all these positive comments though has encouraged me quite a bit. There are still a lot of churches out there that are severely under-served by technology. Kudos to you for using your skills for the kingdom and donating your time to a good cause!
Really cool stuff. My mother's church would benefit from using this kind of software. They are a pretty disorganized.<p>I like seeing labor of love side projects actually turn into something cool and useful.
Just for your information. There's is a simliar tool from Germany in german: <a href="http://www.churchtools.de/" rel="nofollow">http://www.churchtools.de/</a>
This software looks great. I've actually looked at this before, but for a different reason. This is a space sorely lacking in options.<p>My amateur radio club has no coherent roster. We've got a couple people volunteering time to take all the application forms at our secretary's house and put them into a spreadsheet. But I also have spent some time looking to setup an open source club membership roster online. I even started working on a flask application, but don't really have the time to bring it to completion.<p>In my search I found various things revolving around subscription management and a lot of offline club roster type stuff, but nothing that really fit the bill. Most members pay their membership dues in cash, and we'd also like to denote officers of the club.<p>My goal was that we could add members contact information in directly. If they had an email, then they would be able to use that to login. Alternatively, members could go on the site and register themselves, with a club officer validating and activating their account. Members can update their contact information at any time. Club officers can record membership dues and when the current membership expires. While a nice option, we're not really concerned with an ability to pay online or not.<p>There should be privacy checkboxes: share my contact information with club members, share my contact information with with ARES (a 3rd party organization the club is affiliated with and most members are also members of).<p>Finally, members that are authorized should be able to download a roster of members (which is really the whole point).
I'm a complete Rails noob, can anybody help me understand why after installing this my app shows up without any formatting? <a href="http://imgur.com/pQ8wOdG" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/pQ8wOdG</a><p>I did notice that there was a Warning regarding different versions of libxml used for Nekogiri:<p>$ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate
WARNING: Nokogiri was built against LibXML version 2.8.0, but has dynamically loaded 2.7.8
This looks fantastic. Truly a great app here if it works as well as it looks.<p>If anything, I think you might be targeting too small of an audience with this. While I realize there's no incentive for you to make this change, I could easily see someone forking this and using it for any large-ish group of people united under any purpose, such as a PTA or soccer league.
I know little about this kind of software, but a local church uses this site like it provides similar functionality?: <a href="http://www.onthecity.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.onthecity.org/</a><p>Have you compared your project to this company's offering at all? I'm just wondering if they are even similar.
The site looks really nice and polished. I just passed it along to a coworker who handles most of the IT for his church. I know he has been kicking around the idea of spinning up an online directory and some social networking aspects for a while. You may have just saved him a lot of time!
Wow, this solves _so many problems_ for me! I was dreading having to hack together some ugly CRUD solution for my own church's directory-management needs. Thank you so much for doing a wonderful job working on this over the years, and creating an open source solution to boot!
Very neat. I think that with some slight tweaks this could be very applicable to home owners associations. This model could also be offered as a hosted version like someone else commented.<p>(not that I really like HOA's all that much)
One thing I noted, (which I think is really awesome), is how you outline on the main Github page how to contribute and fix bugs. this kind of thing is really helpful in getting people to participate in open source.
Thanks for sharing this. I am going to ask my church if they would be interested in using it. I could easily spin this up on a PaaS and get it up and running. Really neat and original software, kudos man.
Quick question: have you thought about porting this to sandstorm.io? Having a one-click "app-like" install would help out many less-technical church folks.
Looks great! A few years back I built a hosted product similar to this. It was only focused on groups within a church. This looks like it has a whole lot more to it.
Looks cool. Maybe you should change the name so it's not just focused on churches? Non-"church" denominations and organizations could use it as well.
I don't understand what does the software do. It is a "group manager" for churches? Something like Facebook Groups or many others of the same kind?<p>I really liked the aspect of the app and that it was built, because I really think group management and group data is an issue, but WHY is it a problem when there exists Facebook Groups, email groups and lots of other solutions?<p>Is church directory a totally different domain? Have I understood everything wrong?
Looks good. One positive benefit I can see from churches using this is that they won't have to force their members to join Facebook to stay connected.
It looks very, very pretty and user friendly. I can think up ideas, and imagine certain tasks and features, but I can NEVER make an inviting and warm UI.
Surprised about the community response in this thread that is silencing and claiming inappropriateness of criticism. It is strange to see here the glorification of the technological augmentation/support of a most insidious form of marketing -- religion. And this is for a community that slams marketing and advertising as often as it has an opportunity.
Is a good software, I'm sure, but 500 points? Is this some sort of communal self-assurance humble-brag about being accepting of "religious software"? Or does everyone just really love ruby CMSs?