Drupal as Church Management Software (ChMS)
I was thinking about using Drupal for a highly customized Personnel database and thought it sounded similar to a Church Management Software in some way. Has anyone explored using Drupal as a Church Management Software? With CCK and Views what it is, the ability to customize has become rather broad and may be able to handle something of this magnitude. I know some use a CCK/Views ability to manage projects elsewhere and I started the personnel database discussion on the Consulting and Business group.
I imagine that many of you haven't messed with it, but you have pushed CCK and Views heavily. What sorts of limitations might exist that could get in the way? What sort of information would need to be tracked? Can CCK handle things like donation tracking? What would security look like, behind https or a firewall?
Especially with CiviCRM
There is a whole suite of modules already developed for this type of application, called CiviCRM. It works wonderfully as Church Management software.
Anthony Pero
Lima, OH
http://limafirstmedia.com
http://anthonypero.com/booking
I assume you're doing this.
I assume you're doing this. What sort of data and workflows are you tracking with CiviCRM?
Paying for it
Churches have some custom use cases so most churches go with paid church management systems like fellowship one.
First, security is an issue. SSL is one way to secure the data connection but security goes a long way from there. Since there are giving/donation records and they have to report those at the end of the year back to those who made the donations they need backups and to be sure that's in place. For a church to not go with a paid ChMS they need a reliable IT group to manage the backups.
Second, managing the money isn't as simple as recording the donations and giving end of year rollups to be sent out. They need to be able to produce envelopes with envelope ids, reports based on the time in the church year, and more.
Third, most churches do attendance tracking. This needs to be easy to do and have a great workflow.
Fourth, when someone new comes to the church they need a system to track when they came, what they are interested in, and where they have come in getting connected so the church can make sure people don't fall through the cracks. This is a workflow I have not seen often or elsewhere.
If I were going to develop this I wouldn't base it around Views and CCK. I may use them in the development but this is a bit of custom work.
For a personal data store, which is a simpler use case, you very well could use drupal/Views/CCK. It's a different use case with different requirements and needs.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
Thanks for your thoughts on
Thanks for your thoughts on what features would be missing mf.
My limited research suggests that Fellowship One is more workflow based than many other ChMS. (Also surprisingly, it seems to be one of the few with Mac support.) I wonder how much this workflow changes from church to church. Any ideas on this?
Other option
Church Community Builder is another one that has a lot of workflow built into it. (reporting seems to be their weakness though).
Both CCB and F1 are web based - so they would work fine on a Mac - but you would need to be connected to get to their data.
Another Mac one that I've found that looks pretty good is CDM+ (http://www.cdmplus.com/Products/CDMPlus) It doesn't have the workflow options of CCB or F!, but it looks to be a good one with options for web access, and reasonably priced.
Another interesting open source one is Kool - looks like it has a lot of great options (LDAP, Ical, integrates with Typo3 CMS, custom views, etc - but it has recently been translated from German - so it would have quite a bit of learning curve to it. ( http://www.churchtool.org/about.html )
Workflow should be taken into account
A teams workflow should always be taken into account. That's what can make products shine. If something can be created that can help them with their processes the web app is helping them do what they do rather than causing a fuss and forcing them to change their process.
This is just one side, though. Many churches could use better processes. A great discussion might be to come up (working with experts on this) with the best processes for churches and then build a ChMS that does just that. Though, the process based ones might already to just that.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com