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?
Comments
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
Anthony Pero
Lima, OH
http://premiereventconcepts.com
http://tripsports.com
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
Build a ChMS distro on D7
This thread is very old and stale... but I keep thinking that we could produce a pretty compelling ChMS package on D7. My only experience is with Church Community Builder, but I'm convinced that we could achieve much of the functionality that CCB provides with Drupal without writing a single module. The entire "church directory" part, for instance.
There is, to be sure, a lot of module-writing that would have to happen to completely replace every feature that the big guys in the space provide, but I don't think we need to shoot for that. I'm convinced that many small-ish churches (mine's around 300) could use this kind of a package and get everything that they actually use. In the way that the OpenChurch guys have put together a distribution for the front-end of a church website, I think we could put together a distro for the ChMS part.
What do you folks think? I'm a developer myself, and I've got a kid in my church who may be willing to work on this with me over the summer. Is there anyone else in this group who is willing to put some effort into this?
Build a ChMS distro on D7
I would be happy to lend a hand.
Ian
www.community-technology.com
Me and Yautja_cetanu are
Me and Yautja_cetanu are looking at doing exactly this - so are obviously happy to be involved!
Work with others...
It just occurred to me that I shouldn't overlook the efforts of others in this space - I'm thinking in particular of the Red Hen project. That project looks like it has stalled a bit, but I'm sure that much of the work there would be very similar to what is needed for a ChMS.
Hi, Me and another guy called
Hi,
Me and another guy called Rob Mumford are planning on getting start working almost full time from June onwards ish (Properly starting full time August, once we've figured out how to get money to live). We're also planning on working with the Open Church guys (trying to get it on Aegir). We've got a Church in Manchester that we'll be trialling and testing all this stuff out with.
We have exams until june so can't be involved too much. I kind of do research and project managementey stuff (sort of) whereas Rob is a programmer.
Also we're thinking of organising a Drupal for Churches BOF session at Drupal Con London. Got a friend who knows the guys making HTB and Alpha's website so they might be there (dunno yet)
Regarding CRM... There are a
Regarding CRM... There are a bunch of CRM projects around drupal.
http://groups.drupal.org/crm-api - Personally showed the most promise in my opinion
I think these guys are linked to: http://drupal.org/project/dropcrm
http://drupal.org/project/crm - Is a project by Allie, it may look a little dead but it seems she is genuinely doing stuff behind the scenes as she pops up now and then.
There seems to be quite a drive to get a Drupal CRM (at the Drupal cons) and stuff but they aren't quite there yet. http://civicrm.org/ Is very closely linked to drupal and there was even talk of building CiviCRM entirely on top of drupal using it as a framework (didn't happen).
Personally I think these projects are "wait and see" kinds of projects. Ideally I think it would be good to focus on the stuff churches need specifically and do the CRM side of things in a much more limited manner. For example I think Churches need Rota Management, Event Management, Dashboards for those things, Volunteer management (tied in with events and rotas) and Worship Music/Band management (like selecting songs and stuff). Then sermons need to be done (like in Open Church but extended) and a way for sermon leaders to manage things (like upload sermons themselfs, see their sermons in a dashboard/calendar, etc).
All this can be done with a very limited Drupal based CRM and I think done quite well. So I think it would be good to just go ahead and start doing things, keeping the Drupal CRM projects in mind with the intention to merge things in the future if the CRM stuff takes off. Personally I think for now it would be good to work based of CiviCRM but one of the programmers in my Group (Andrew Belcher) hasn't enjoyed working with CiviCRM. I don't exactly know why and I love the CiviCRM community so I dunno about that.
Anyways I'd be happy to give a huge amount of our time to help this if this goes anywhere.
I really liked the looks of
I really liked the looks of CRM API and crm - but they're all pretty dead. I've been tyring to get some discussion going on those projects but no-ones said anything for months! CiviCRM i think is a little too heavy, and for some reason (which I can't work out) didn't move to Drupal when they started rewriting version 4.
Might be worth just making all these features seperate from eachother, but deliberatly written so that they are totally compatible with eachother.
Hey guys, I'm excited to hear
Hey guys,
I'm excited to hear that there is interest in collaborating on this project! Right now it looks like I might have up to 3 people able to put some time into this over the summer, so I'd love to collaborate with you two about this. Do you have code written or perhaps plans written down already? I've just been recruiting so far, and so we haven't even started brainstorming yet. Where are you guys in the process?
One other thing you should know is that i have an exam coming up in about a week and a half that I will need to spend time preparing for. I won't be able to work on this at all until after that time.
Hi again :) Yeah me and rob
Hi again :)
Yeah me and rob have exams. Mine finish on 2nd of June but I have a dissertation that will finish on the 12th of december. We've spoken a little about what we're up to here, http://drupal.org/node/1056486 and we've started writing a business plan (that is far from perfect). We're a team of 3, 2 students and one guy who is a freelance developer who's worked on a few charity organisations in the UK. That guy (andrew belcher) is going to be more free in July.
Also I'd quite like to have a Drupal for Church DOF session at DrupalCon London.
In terms of where we're at now, we tried making a church distribution but open church got there first and better :P We have a church near where we live in manchester that we plan on starting to work with in september. We'll be moving their site to drupal and sorting out some front-end stuff. They are particularly interested in Volunteer management software. Andrew works with an IT consultanting company that especially caters for charities and christian organisations, they have something called "Office Manager" which they have built themself. They are thinking of moving the "front-end" to drupal (though not the whole thing) so in our heads we had kind of thought about working with that a little.
However, if you guys are thinking of putting some effort into a church management system for drupal then it would be awesome to get involved in that. We're committing to working on Drupal for church stuff for a year whilst we figure out how to make money to live off and possibly longer if things work out.
In terms of further resources. I started looking into this a year ago and tried to regularly blog at http://thevr.wordpress.com but it didn't get far. I also have that business plan and I have an Open Atrium site with a bunch of ideas written down, again it didn't get well maintained as we resorted to talking over the phone instead ofwriting things down like we should have. I could give you access to that, but I think maybe it would be best to wait till after exams? Maybe early june we could get talking?
Yeah, my exams are done on
Yeah, my exams are done on the 8th of June, after which I'm pretty free. We do have a large list of features with some ideas of how to implement them written down somewhere. I could probably put that into a readable format if you are interested?
D7 ChMS
I saw your post over on the Red Hen thread and popped over here...glad to see all of this interest. I'm working on a project that is, initially, focused on providing membership management services for community associations, but I am considering broadening the scope to include churches later on. Like you, I've been following the Red Hen project pretty closely, as it is precisely the project I've been waiting for. I would really prefer something that is a little less, shall we say, "comprehensive" and more tightly integrated with Drupal core than CiviCRM. The pace of the Red Hen project is slower than I would like to see, but I'm not going to fault someone else for the pace of work that I'm not paying them for.
If there is one aspect of CiviCRM that is drawing me back towards that project, other than the fact that it is mature and ready to implement, it is the CiviAccounts project, which promises a whole new level of integration with backend accounting systems. Again, I would prefer to implement the same functionality on top of something like Red Hen and Commerce, but at this point, unless they really step that project up or, as you suggested, accept help from others with putting the project together, I'm probably going to be forced to develop the project with CiviCRM.
DoublePost =S
whoops
YouthTracker.net
Hey everyone!
I too, like "ldweeks," am excited to read this discussion.
I would love to offer my input as you guys get this going. I have been using church/mission related db's for over 7 years. I have used several different ones and have a good understanding of what is needed. I'm just starting with Drupal so my programming skills aren't the best, but I can do wonders at finding bugs and glitches and writing user manuals.
Build a ChMS distro on D7
I came across this company but I'm not sure if they're sharing - http://www.backofficethinking.com/services-for-churches
Should we look at integrating what we do with open church to make it into a more powerful system. It seems to make sense to take the best of open church and add the missing functions behind the scenes.
jaykali has a wiki http://groups.drupal.org/node/24494 that we could use as a starting point for discussion.
www.community-technology.com
Don't forget about
Don't forget about http://mustardseedmedia.com/ - they had a good series of podcasts on using drupal (and some other CMS's) in a church setting.
While it would be good to
While it would be good to work alongside OpenChurch, I don't really think we should worry about it too much. If we do this well then all the modules should be able to work with eachother anyway :). I love what jaykali has done but it still seems like a bit of a wip, it uses lots of it's own modules (which isn't really the Drupal way of doing things) whereas it would probably be better to build a system on top of loads of pre-existing (and therefore alreayd supported, maintained and checked for security) modules. Still, thats a conversation for further down the line i think. Lets work out what we want to do, feature lists and use cases.
count me in
I'm definitely interested in helping out. I'm a developer by trade and am going to start working on this exact thing over the next few months. I've also been involved with starting a few churches and am currently helping lead one. I can help with requirements gathering and development.
The ProsePoint project is
The ProsePoint project is heading towards payware. I suspect the OpenPublish will do the same thing. Aquia and the Garden thing are payware.
Too bad they couldn't just start scratch... not using OpenSource to build from and then charge for.
IMO, that's...
Anyway, to prevent that abuse, if it is abuse to you the best way is only to support and work with such development groups when they use only regular drupal modules.
Seems... when they start messing around in the folders and create their own little proprietary stuff the opensource becomes the gateway to payware.
Just my two cents, and it may not be worth two cents... but there it is anyway.
I do understand their thinking. Afterall the work some people contribute they begin to change their attitudes about opensource their hard work.
I say avoid projects with potential to go payware, unless you think the current benefits are worth it to you.
Go with Drupal modules and themes, and anyone that wants to create their own folders and stuff to make their modules proprietary ---- avoid.
Getting Started
Hi Guys,
I'm planning on getting started with things from this friday onwards. There is quite a bit that needs to be done before any code will get written but I thought I'd write this to get the ball rolling by saying what we're planning on getting up to.
1) Firstly, we played around with Open Church a while back, ran into a couple of problem with aegir. Jay contacted me about those but we haven't had a chance to get into it. So one of the first things we want to do is get stuck into open church, aegir, any issues we can help with and possibly the move to Drupal 7.
2) We are currently designing a "Prayer Wall" module. It will create a prayer entity or content-type that means people can pray like in a forum but also a styled graphical aggregate that allows an individual to quickly see an overview of what people are praying about. I need a basic form of this for my personal research for a master dissertation in for september so we'll be really getting into this first. I have the first draft of how it will look so I'd be happy to post this if people are interested in it.
3) We have a power point presentation of "the tribes online toolset". These are the tools we want to build towards church web development that would probably exist as features or modules in a drupal distribution. Its a google spreadsheet answering What? Why and How? On one slide per tool. Some of these tools include technical stuff like, platforum for updating multiple sites, generic stuff like "slideshows", church website stuff like sermon library or stuff to do with church management like rotas. They are the very first step in dealing with this stuff and most of the tools can be solved by modules that already exist. We just have to play with them. But I can post the link if people are interested.
4) We have an openatrium website where I've collected various bit of information regarding this stuff such as trying to outline features of a church distribution or doing write ups of competitors. Its not fully up to date but I'd be happy to give access to anyone who wants it and start working on doing things like writing up what the other guys do. However I dunno if we want to collaborate elsewhere?
5) We have ideas of business modules based on this stuff. I am very interested in finding ways where money can be made with absolutely no sacrifice to the opensource nature of drupal. I way prefer, for example, the way ChromiumOS is built then Android. I think making money involves producing value. I think if the value to customers is found in the marketting (which I see is essentially a way of presenting research to individual churches) and services rather then the software or features then a business model can be built that doesn't at all trend on the shoes of people wanting to do things entirely for free. It means competitors to us in the UK could steal our software and compete by providing a better service. This I think ulimately benefits the churches the most as clever features and ideas can still be shared. Anyways. I'd be happy to spin this point off somewhere else if someone wants to talk about it more to prevent the worries outlined by domineaux.
6) We have a local church website we will be moving from a bespoke system into drupal, probably based on open church.
So what do you think? Anything you think I should focus on and look at? Where should we start talking and collaborating? Our atrium site quickly got messy as its much easier to think of lots of vague ideas then start getting clear specific.
ideas...
Interesting...
1) Although it would greatly simplify things to develop in D7 out of the box, there are a number of what I would consider essential modules that will not be ready for a while. Complicating this is the fact that, assuming that for our project we will be using CiviCRM as the contact management backend, most CiviAccounts development is taking place in the D7 version. Also, what were the issues with Aegir? I've been experimenting with adding platforms based on other installation profiles, mostly using the Aegir-Barracuda-Octopus distribution, and found the drush make process to work pretty well, although CiviCRM does introduce problems on Nginx (at least for me).
2) Have you considered trying to build the Prayer Wall on top of something like Facebook-Style Statuses? It would seem to provide an excellent framework for something like this.
3) I'd definitely like to take a look at what you've put together...got a lot of thoughts on this.
4) I started doing this a while back, but haven't been as focused as much on the church markets for a while. I'd be glad to look at what you have and see if what I have might prove to be a useful addition.
5) There are a lot of ways to approach this market. My experience, at least from a technology sales perspective, is that you really need to eliminate as many barriers to entry as possible because there is no way you can charge enough to make up for the sales time it takes to get them to make the initial commit, particularly for the small to mid-size organizations with tighter budgets. As for spending a lot of time and energy developing a distribution on top of or similar to OpenChurch, I guess I'm still not sold on the benefits investing so much time and energy when there are so many important supporting modules (such as the Prayer Wall) that would both make your project more viable and contribute back to the broader Drupal community. With OpenChurch, which I have not actually installed (just used the demo, which seems very well put together), it is only a publishing platform, not a ChMS, so by the time you build that type of functionality you might as well have started from scratch, I would think. I guess I disagree with dominaeux's assertion that there is something wrong with the the Drupal Gardens project, or that it is even payware to begin with. They are merely providing an optimized platform for hosting D7 sites, then making substantial contributions back to the community (http://drupal.org/project/media_gallery , for example).
Anyway, those are some initial thoughts. I'm looking forward to seeing what you put together.
This is only quick because I
This is only quick because I should really be using this time to revise.
1) I'm not yet convinced about whether CiviCRM is the best thing to build on, although my opinions on the matter aren't that well informed or up to dater. Convince me if you think it's good to use CiviCRM as a backend. In my understanding, we don't really want a separate back end/front end solution (which is a concept that has been discussed in depth around the drupal community).
5) Agree with you here, I'm also unconvinced on the value of building on top of Open Church, atleast to start with.
why civi...
I share your concerns with regard to CiviCRM and I would frankly be much happier to see a project like Red Hen far enough along to start using as a membership management platform, but the reality is that, while those guys have some great ideas and have really hit a sweet spot, they still have to do things like pay their their bills and keep their lights on. So, unfortunately, I think its going to be a while before there's going to be a mature system to work with there. For my purposes, I think I would be looking at 5-6 months to get all of the pieces I need to a mature state on D7. It would take a lot to convince me otherwise, particularly with things like Commerce integration that are going to require some time to work out.
In the meantime, CiviCRM is already available on both D6 and D7, it has a mature base of users and developers, it's fully integrated with at least a few of the major payment processors, and Koumbit has worked out most of the kinks on aegir implementation (although I'm still not clear on how you can put together CiviCRM install profiles). The API continues to improve, so between that and modules like webform_civicrm, you should be able to create a pretty tight, well-integrated user experience.
2 cents...
Hi pomaking (and others),
Great to see this discussion is pulling a few people together... Feels like there might be a bit of milage in this!
My post got a little bit long, so my summary is that I'm excited to see a bunch of people with similar ideas and intents. I think one of the basic things that needs to be throughout what we do is keeping the barriers to entry as low as possible for both end users (so UX of interfaces etc), web admins (system requirements and distributions) and developers (platforms and apis to be learnt). And more importantly - what's the best way to start collating ideas of features and methods to achieve them? As someone coming to this thread part way through, I'm already finding it easy to get a little lost!
Directly in response to pomaking:
Personally, I've got a couple feelings (maybe with a couple thoughts added...) with how things would need to work for churches...
As you said, the boundaries to using it must be as low as possible. I think this applies both to the end users (so making a distribution as simple as possible to add pages, update your details etc), but also to web administrators/developers. Ideally we need something that's as flexible and easy to start using as Drupal is - it works on any box with low requirements. OpenChurch have done a good job on starting some of the more content management and themeing side of that with their distribution. My concern if we focus on things like SaaS or 'Aegir-Barracuda-Octopus distribution' (which, btw, I only know a little about Aegir and nothing about the other two) means that someone who isn't either in the know or keen to be in the know might find that as a bit of a barrier... Although our developement may look to work with 'Octopus' seamlessly, which it should, I think it should be from the angle of 'lets make it work seamlessly with everything, including Octopus'. That way, even if the difference of code is nil, the perception from someone coming fresh to it without in depth knowledge will be vast. That's exactly what Drupal have invested a lot of time and energy into with the transition from D6-D7, and although D7 maybe isn't all that much more powerful than D6 in terms of what you can achieve with it and it's contributed modules, your average joe developer who's never used drupal before (that was me a year ago) doesn't get lost before they even start.
Similarly, from my experience using CiviCRM (which admittedly has been entirely with Joomla which I understand is a different kettle of fish!) the level of entry is a step higher than drupal, even if only the system requirements. In my mind, that pushes me to look to see if we can do things with core drupal and, if we can't, look to see if we can work with the CiviCRM guys to reduce that hurdle before framing everything around it. I suppose ultimately there has to be a balance between with speed of development. From my experience of trying to integrate separate bits of software (which I understand CiviCRM have made a fantastic start on with drupal), I would always err on the cautious side.
I would perhaps say the same with the Facebook/Prayer Wall idea. Long term, I think for it to be successful, it really does want to be in there. But I wonder if requiring Facebook at the beginning might be a step too far for the majority of churches that haven't really dabbled with Facebook much. I would probably be inclined to build it separately and then in the longer run provide optional integration to make the most of the benefits of social media tools.
In regards to your point 5... Yes, from what I've seen, OpenChurch is a publishing platform not a ChMS, but for a successful ChMS, you must also have a publishing platform. The site's I have done for people coming from packages like ChurchInsight have been coming away not because of the capabilities of it's backend, but because of frustrations with it's publishing side of things. Personally I would be much more inclined to put the early emphasis on nailing an out of the box church publishing distribution before even starting on the ChMS side of things! Whatever we do will have an element of starting from scratch, even if it's only from the point of view of working out what features and how the UI should work for your average church administrator to be able to use it. So in the same way of D7 Core vs D7 + contrib vs D7 + CiviCRM is a discussion worth having, so it OpenChurch vs Core.
It would be all to easy to get caught up in discussing specifics before even knowing if we're all trying to achieve the same thing! What specifically would you count as the 'core modules' that are a while off?
Forget what I was saying
Forget what I was saying about Aegir-Octopus, that's basically just a hosting platform and was only brought up in reference to the issues with OpenChurch on Aegir...not particularly relevant to the discussion at hand. My focus is definitely more on the SaaS side of the house, though.
As for CiviCRM, it is absolutely too complex in its standard form for most small to mid-size organizations. In a SaaS scenario, however, many of the administrative requirements can be reduced or eliminated and the user interface can be handled through the API. Again, I would be happier to see contact, membership, pledge, contribution, and event management take place through a CRM system integrated with core, using the Entity API, and handling transactions through Drupal Commerce. I think these are critical components for a ChMS, but Red Hen is the only remotely serious option (besides Salesforce API) and I just think that is a long way down the road at this point, particularly before you get into real complexity like transaction processing.
I was just throwing FBSS out there as an approach. Out of the box, it does not have anything to do with Facebook; it only mimics the style of the Facebook Statuses.
I agree that before this conversation goes much further here, we should probably try to get a handle on who is really serious and what everyone is actually trying to achieve.
Who is Cooridnating?
I keep reading through these posts and have come to the same conclusion each time... confusing!
While I understand the over arching theme throughout, there seems to be a bit of lack in continuity.
So here is where I am. I am willing to help in whatever capacity I am capable; however, I think we need a clear "leader" who can setup the vision for this package. I believe once we are all have a clear vision we can move forward with outlining what will be needed.
I would like to see something like this for us to get started...
Vision (what is the ultimate goal)
ChMS | Publication abilities | User Interface
Overview of a single account (each person is a single entity, what information do we need to store?)
Roles (the roles within a church: Pastor, Assoc. Pastor, Youth Pastor, Office Manager, Financial Manager, member, teacher, leader, etc.)
Modules (what is needed to fulfill the needs of each of the roles)
I believe that we could easily open a blog or white pages on each of these areas to get a more pointed direction.
Perhaps we could then take the feed back and analyzes what aspects are a necessity verses those that are not.
Who is Cooridnating?
I keep reading through these posts and have come to the same conclusion each time... confusing!
While I understand the over arching theme throughout, there seems to be a bit of lack in continuity.
So here is where I am. I am willing to help in whatever capacity I am capable; however, I think we need a clear "leader" who can setup the vision for this package. I believe once we are all have a clear vision we can move forward with outlining what will be needed.
I would like to see something like this for us to get started...
Vision (what is the ultimate goal)
ChMS | Publication abilities | User Interface
Overview of a single account (each person is a single entity, what information do we need to store?)
Roles (the roles within a church: Pastor, Assoc. Pastor, Youth Pastor, Office Manager, Financial Manager, member, teacher, leader, etc.)
Modules (what is needed to fulfill the needs of each of the roles)
I believe that we could easily open a blog or white pages on each of these areas to get a more pointed direction.
Perhaps we could then take the feed back and analyzes what aspects are a necessity verses those that are not.
Justin, is that you
Justin, is that you volunteering :P?
I sort of lead the group of us that include me, rlmumford and andrewbelcher. We're going to be working full-time on this from next week onwards sort of and fully full-time from September onwards. So I can help with at least some of the administrative side of leading. I'd quite like to hear from ldweeks again because ldweeks seemed to have a vision as well. Although personally I quite like the idea of us all coming from slightly different angles.
pomaking. This weekend I will try and get our openatrium site sorted. Having a couple of issues with our host. I'll post that up here and it might be quite a good starting place to sort through things. Also I like you thing of thinking of what can be done in 5-6 months. I think thats quite a good time frame to focus development on especially when thinking about civicrm, etc. For your interest we made this presentation for someone, its not very detailed https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AXDR-ROit49JZGRibXNmdmJfNjZ0a2h...
Personally I think it would be good to keep this thread open to people generally talking about wanting to get involved and find somewhere else to discuss the specifics. I chatted to people in the IRC channel and we could do a couple of things:
1) Start a new thread in the churches group
2) Start a new group called Church Management Software
3) Go to an external site.
Personally I think we should go with 2, and report back here ever so often because wherever we go, I intend to start posting quite a bit and I think it will get annoying for most people not particularly wanting to be involved with this development. I think trying to use drupal's resources is a good place to start and we could move off to an external site if things get to annoying here. So I propose we make a new group? Anyone think otherwise?
Absolutely!
I would definitely be interested in helping out!
You tell me what you'd like me to do and I'll get onto it.
I do not have experience programing; however, I have worked with db's for over 7 years and have gone through major integrations, changes and complete conversions. I'm also an analyst, so I am used to analyzing both demographic information as well as financial.
I am totally in favor of keeping this on drupal and maintaining both blogs. I think you are correct about people getting bogged down with the technical data.
I reviewed your slides and I must say that I am quite impressed with what you are looking to accomplish.
Perhaps we can chat in irc sometime soon.
5-6 months
Sorry I haven't been contributing lately...our family had a pretty big move recently and I haven't had much time for anything else.
I've been going through your presentation, as well as the openatrium site and making some notes. The 5-6 month time frame was basically an optimistic time frame at having a working D7-based CRM up and running (Red Hen or otherwise). Red Hen development seems to be stuck in first gear and we've never seen a solid roadmap for where they intend to take that package. Frankly, I keep coming back to CiviCRM as the only practical solution for several reasons, not the least of which is the ability to develop a beta in D6 and have a solid upgrade path. I understand the reservations about the system, but I believe it can be surprisingly flexible in the right hands (see http://civicrm.org/blogs/colemanw/pushing-envelope-civicase , for example) and the "bloat" is not so much an issue, I believe, when you're talking about productizing the system.
As for real development, this is no place to do any of that. My experience with these discussions is that people get all excited and genuinely want to help, but then interest fades away and you're left with a great discussion for the archive. The sooner we can identify a core group of developers that seriously intend to be involved with putting this system together in the short term (easy for me to say, since I'm not actually a developer), develop a solid set of requirements or use cases, and move development to a system like IBM Rational Team Concert or Pivotal Tracker, the greater the prospects for success. Suggestion #2 of yours is good for the interim, if they approve the group.
Look for an email from me to discuss some of this in greater detail, or perhaps we can get on skype sometime.
Taking a modular approach
I'm definitely interested in helping out as well. I'm going to spend some time updating my own church's site and it would be nice to contribute some of that work back to the community.
One thing I think we should do first is identify all of the features we'd like to have. Then identify which contrib modules could meet any of those requirements, and where there isn't a contrib module to meet a requirement, we develop a new module. Obviously, we shouldn't do a new module for each feature, but we should group related features into their own module.
For my personal build I don't really have a need for a prayer wall so it would be nice to enable and disable certain features on an as needed basis.
Maybe something like this process would work:
1) create business / functional requirements - everyone say what features they want and how they want it to function.
2) create technical requirements - divide into smaller team w/ a SME (subject matter expert)
3) develop.
Anyway, I'm willing to help out as I'm going to be spending time developing my own site this summer.
I think It would be best to
I think It would be best to adopt a more agile approach the the development of something like this. So once we have a list of features we want, we need to order them by how integral they are and the most integral get developed first. I'm thinking things like how to we manage user accounts and contact entities - these need to be sorted out pretty early one, so that all of the other stuff can build on top of them seemlessly (here's how CRM api were going to tackle that issue: http://groups.drupal.org/node/89779 )
Once we've got the foundations sorted we can start seriously working on other things. This would allow for new features to be added (and removed) throughout the process and should mean that some things can be working much quicker.
It might be worth dispersing
It might be worth dispersing and piling into the existing CRM projects so we can get the ball rolling a bit. I'm gonna get on the new group now.
Hey guys, Sorry for the
Hey guys,
Sorry for the silence from my end. My exam was repeatedly pushed back, and so I only actually completed it two days ago. But now I'm back, and I hope to re-engage fully in this project. I hope that we can accomplish something significant this summer.
I've gone through the comments, and I agree: It's confusing! Here, then, is a list of people that have indicated that they'd be willing to help in some capacity (please don't hesitate to jump in if you want to add your name to this list):
ldweeks
ian-moran
rlmumford
yautja_cetanu
justin.rehklau
jonathanmd
pomaking
andrewbelcher
I agree that we need to take this discussion elsewhere, and I think that the best idea, at least initially, is to simply start a new g.d.o group. It looks like a Church Management Software group has already been started - thanks rlmumford! We should continue the discussion over there.
Just a few of my thoughts on this project:
There is more that I could say, but I'll save it for the new group page. As others have already mentioned, the first thing we need to do is get clarity on our goals. We're each coming to the table with different goals, and so we need to get them clearly out in the open so that we can begin the merge process. I think that the next step is to create a wiki in the new ChMS group where each of us specify our top 3 goals for the project.
Again, I'm looking forward to working on this. How much time I spend on this depends on getting a couple other guys in my church on board, and so I'll make the pitch to them very soon.
And FYI: Just in case anyone is interested, or could possibly find my work useful, here is the repo that I've created for the churches that I've been working with. I'd be delighted if you found something that you actually could use, so feel free to dig in.
No more lurking
Just want to register my interest - I've already joined the new group. Besides having one foot in the web development world (Drupal, specifically, since 4.6), I've also been involved in pastoral leadership for the past 20 years or so. I've seen staff struggle with inflexible and generally unusable ChMSs, and from a pastoral team perspective I've struggled with the inability of workstation-based packages to facilitate multi-staff, mobile workflows and everyday use. Not to mention my innate desire to foster community-based functionality. All this is to say, I'm happy to be part of the efforts.
I'm working with a non-profit right now in implementing CiviCRM (it's a soccer club, and it will ultimately involve some significant extensions to Civi), so I can affirm that at the small-to-medium congregation level, CiviCRM is overkill. Its requirements are problematic, too, especially for shared hosting (the latest version requires MySQL 5.1.x, which many shared hosts are slow to implement, particularly ones with datacentres located here in Canada, which is a core requirement for some of us; the best option for hosting Civi is a VPS, which is out of range for most churches I've been involved with).
So, bring on the lightweight, functional, super-usable, secure D7-based ChMS (with OG support). See y'all in the group...
Craig
VPS
I have a Linux VPS (with PowerVPS - http://www.powervps.com/), but it runs MySQL 5.0.45-7.el5 . I am not sure if that helps you, but I am willing to set up a site for the group.
I too want to register my interest. I want to rework my churches web site (http://zioncc.org/) to a Drupal site (http://zioncc.us/). My buddy and I have been a bit stuck and perhaps it takes a group effort to move us off the dime.
Did somebody mention this list of Drupal church sites? http://groups.drupal.org/node/2700 - I just ran across while searching for this site: http://secondpres.info/
A couple years ago, the author of the Second Presbyterian site expressed a plan to make her framework available and I don't know what happened. I got busy and didn't follow up.
Welcome back ldweeks
Welcome back ldweeks :)
justin, I'll try and hang around the #drupal-churches irc chat channel as much as possible next week, happy to have skype conversations as well. I'm also aiming to get our open atrium site open again as we go into more detail about specific features we'd like to build (although most are related to a church distribution, rather then ChMS). Also I have alot of information about alternative offerings including one open source church management system not built on drupal that I found. I'd really like to investigate those and write up what kind of features they have...
So just for all your information. Next week I will start doing that (looking at the alternatives and writing about it). Also Rob finishes exams on wednesday so we'll sit down and chat more specifically about exactly how we can be involved and where it would make more sense for us to help out, then we can do the whole specifying the top 3 goals thing.
I'll try and spend a bit of time next week looking through your stuff ldweeks.
We need to track down some projects to make enough money to live off so how much time we spend on this depends on whether we're eating well :P
Drupal Group Update
Just a little heads up, as ldweeks pointed out, there is now a Church Management Software group. The moderators have been asking us to clarify why this conversation warrants a group of its own. I have said that the focus of the Churches group isn't so much about development and more about showcasing and general Drupal-related advice whereas the Church Management Software group is more targetted at the development of something (be that a distribution, collection of modules or whatever). Hopefully they'll give us the go ahead soon but, just so you know, we're talking to them about that now.
Wow chiebert, you seem to have a wealth of experience in some really helpful areas. For all my harking on about CiviCRM being big and feature-heay, my view is predominantly based on fairly limited experience, a short play with the code and the feeling i get from the way developers around the open-source community talk about it. It would be really good to hear about your experiences, what's it really good at? Is there anything that actually gets in the way of performance and usability that we totally wouldn't need? Someone mentioned using CiviAccounts earlier - and I think you can use that as near enough a stand alone.
Civiaccounts
Not quite sure what you mean by using Civiaccounts as a standalone, but I'll expand on this in the the new http://groups.drupal.org/church-management-software group as a way moving discussion over there...
Skill sets?
Thanks for the update, rlmumford. If we can't get our own group, then we can just create a wiki in this one. No problem either way.
Another thing that comes to mind: I think it would be very helpful to let everyone know what skill sets we each bring to the table. To build a compelling product, I think we're probably going to need some expertise in a number of areas. The role that I'm the most concerned about right now, frankly, is "the architect". I took a smattering of computer science classes in high school and college, but ended up with a liberal arts degree (International Studies). I've taught myself PHP (doesn't everybody?) since I've been involved with Drupal, which is about 2.5 years. I don't know any Javascript or any CSS, though I wish I knew both.
The point is this: if I look like I know what I'm doing, then I've fooled you well! I feel very weak on the topic of architecture, and it's going to have an impact on everything that we do, obviously. I think it may be possible for us to figure it out as we go along by studying examples out there in the wild... but it would be great if someone with experience architecting systems like this would grab the reins and take the lead.
Skills
Technical Side
I'm a developer for an interactive agency called http://digitaria.com. About 80% of what I do is in Drupal so I've got a fair amount of experience (module development and theming) with Drupal 6, but not too much with Drupal 7. I'm also very good at JS & CSS and am familiar (but not an expert) with the sys admin side of things.
Business / Requirements Side
I've been involved with a few different church plants now and am currently helping lead a church out in San Diego so I'm familiar with a lot of the requirements that go into running a church when it comes to things like keeping track of finances, attendance, scheduling volunteers, creating podcasts and following up with visitors.
Skills
I'm a database manager, accountant and prospect researcher for a long established private college. I am responsible for maintaining our current database as well as entering financial information. That said, I have grown up in the church and spent many years doing missions trips and working with various ministries. My wife and were missionaries for 3 years before returning stateside.
In my travels I have developed a unique set of skills...
I have been through multiple conversions of large (30,000 records+) databases including dbase, SQL, Omnis7 (MAC), and a few others.
I was the implementation specialist for my department to line up our database fields (2,000+) correctly.
I have written numerous help docs for some of the programs I have used.
I have had extensive work in training individuals in using new software packages.
I also do quite a bit of data analyzing for keeping databases clean and functional as well as analyzing demographic information.
Business Side
I have worked with finances in both missions organizations and non-profit higher education. I am very familiar with accounting, auditing, gift entry, expenses, and reporting. During our latest conversion we had to reconfigure our entire general ledger and create new GL numbers for all of our accounts.
I have worked in fundraising for the last 5 years so I am pretty in tune for options that churches may use to help benefit their legacy, (Endowments, Annuities, Trusts, etc.).
Ministry Side
I have been a youth pastor for several years, though the ages of the kids have varied.
Skills
This is our atrium distribution: http://www.thetribesonline.co.uk
For now it requires admin approval as it was only made for internal use. However if you want to sign up I'll enable your accounts if you have similar names to what you have on drupal groups. I dunno if we want to use this site more or keep things on drupal groups but I'm happy to open it up if thats the case. However, I wander if we should try and do things in the groups as much as possible.
I'm James Abrahams and I'm currently a student finishing a masters in business. I'm in a team of 3 (Andrew Belcher and Rob Mumford) who are both programmers whereas I handle kind of all other aspects of our team. We're planning on starting a software as a service business based on drupal in the UK.
Technical side
I've spent a few years working part-time for a shipping company with IT. Mainly spent some time with Sharepoint including the administration, deployment and setting up pages without sharepoint designer. Particularly interested in information management. We (inc. andrew and rob) set up a couple of websites of individual companies including a thai boxing website that sold and managed tickets to events. Spent the last year playing with drupal and reading about it as part of my business masters.
Business Side
The thai boxing website involved dealing with many different areas of the business as the website was pretty central to it. Unfortunately due to various reasons that business venture failed. I tend to get involved in the development of ideas and project management as well as developing the way software should work (though no programming skills anymore)
Ministry side
I worked for a year in a church and did a variety of stuff from youth work, to admin to preaching, to event organising. I started a team that built a website for the youth group based on phpbb. This grew pretty rapidly for a while and rob and andrew (amongst others) joined me in developing the site into a CMS where content could be assigned dynamically to forum posts that also dealt with the multi-site nature of the church (with multiple congregations). Lots of what we're wanting to do with the tribes online (our new company) comes from ideas we had here.
I'm pretty green to the world of work so the main thing I can offer is a huge amount of time. This (A church distribution in general, not just church management) is pretty much all I want to do for the next 2 years. If I can live off drupal work then potentially longer.
Skills
Also sorry for the quietness on my side.
I'm a developer in New Jersey, but for the guys in Manchester I'm originally from Bradford just across the Pennines.
As I work largely on my own I'm a jack of all trades, and still trying to master one. So I can throw the usual array of coding into the pot, and will be happy to work on modules as we need them.
I'm with ldweeks on considering Drupal 7 as our tool. Things might not be ready yet, but we can always push development along.
www.community-technology.com
Our Site is up
Hi Guys,
I've now opened up our atrium site: http://www.thetribesonline.co.uk/ so you don't need to sign up to read this stuff. Its not used by us much yet but we'll start getting calenders of our own personal stuff on there. We're aiming to get a sermon library and prayer wall sorted originally.
Also are any of you guys going to DrupalCon London? I'm interested in doing a BoF session, might start organising it next week.
Interested to contribute / DrupalCon London BoF
Hi Guys,
Sorry I've been too busy over the last couple of months to be involved in this discussion, but I'm very interested and willing to contribute when I have the time.
I'm London based and will definitely be at DrupalCon London and would be very interested to be involved in a BoF.
By way of introduction/background: I'm a pro developer. Most of my past sites have been with a Java/Postgres CMS I built myself (started ~2004 when it made sense to roll your own), but I've been doing all new work on Drupal for the last 2 years.
I've done several church sites, but by far the best (mostly a labour of love over 10 years) is my own church http://www.stmarks-battersea.org.uk/. This is currently built my own CMS, but the plan is to port to Drupal as I find the time.
As well as lots of basic pages, a few features of interest:
- sermon database containing 4 years worth (mp3 files stored on Amazon AWS S3)
- booking and payment of certain big events (e.g. church weekends away)
- recommended books list (linking to multiple suppliers)
- overseas mission partners, including google map
- database of counsellors (due to be be moved away to a separate site)
There's also a full members database (~600 members) for staff use, which includes home groups and all teams/activity/ministry groups that people are involved in. It produces some useful stats on how many people are involved in home groups and ministries, age distributions and stuff like that.
Looking forward to meeting some of you in London!
Andy
Just thought I'd slip in a
Just thought I'd slip in a little 'helllo' here. I actually worked on a missionary networking system (a D7 module) as part of my third year Computer Science project. If you want to have a look at that I'm going to be clearing it up ready to put in a sandbox project on drupal.org.
Currently it gives every missionary a profile that they can edit and a type of micro-blo/facebook like feed for updates and prayer requests. The flag module allows users to "follow" missionaries and "like"/"say amen" to the updates. The actions (or rules) module can then be used to send email updates to followers of a missionary. The module also creates a map block that shows the location of all the missionaries on a world map (this is still a bit wip - you have to enter a long/lat pair for location, but I think the geolocation module can fix that). I'm also going to work on the permissions so that other users can be assigned to update the missionaries page (as alot of churches seem to have link members or some similar system for dealing with communication).
We're (the tribes online trio) also working on a resources library.
Pomaking -
Pomaking - www.thetribesonline.co.uk is a public site so please feel free to post anything in any of the features of stuff that interests you. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on them. I'd also be happy to chat on skype. I'm free most of next week (bar tuesday) at the moment so e-mail me a time if you want to chat further.
My thoughts are this. Eventually I think we want a CRM on Drupal. I feel like having one community, one set of apis, etc is intrinsically better even though the civicrm community is awesome. However, also I like your 5-6 month time frame and it seems like of the people who have offered to help here. Its mainly us 2 that have a short-term deadline that really needs to be met.
So for that reason I'm definitely intrigued at seeing how people in this group work things out (realising that drupal crms have been discussed for a while and not really gone anywhere). We (me andrew and rob) are speaking to someone on the 28th of June that we may be working with, he has his own proprietary CRM system. So I think we'll aim to fully make a descision on what work we're going to do around then. For now the tasks before Drupalcon are what we're focusing on (So regarding CRM, it means particularly looking at the competitors which I think will help whether we use drupal, civicrm or the proprietary system). It might end up that we work in tandem doing stuff with this group for long term stuff but stuff with other systems for short term stuff. I don't know but thought I should say what our timeline would be.
Andy_Reid:- Cool, if there is at least one other person there! I'll try and figure out how to organise it next week. I'd quite like to see if we can get some of the htb guys down. They have a blog here: http://www.alphawebteam.com/ I think most church developers tend to be short on time and so develop only for what they are paid to do (their own church). So I think we (The Tribes Online) can be used as the people to do the extra work of taking what works on one site and maintaining them as modules on drupal.org (Support in the Issues queues, etc).
We have 2 church websites we are currently thinking of moving to drupal but would love to work with you. Our hope is to have the overseas mission partners module and sermon library modules done by drupalcon. www.thetribesonline.co.uk is slowly becoming our public facing tasks if you're interested and we'll have a demo of our mission partners module next week.
Ok guys, me and rob are going
Ok guys, me and rob are going to be helping to organise a Drupal CRM code sprint at DrupalCon London. I think this may be the start of our involvement in making the Church management stuff as well.
http://london2011.drupal.org/scheduleitem/drupal-crm-sprint
Awesome! Well done. I wish I
Awesome! Well done. I wish I could be there.
And I do officially apologize for being yet another person to get a thread going only to flake out later on. I'm sorry about that, but I'm glad that we're still moving towards a Drupal CRM.
Thanks again.
Thats ok Ldweeks, if you
Thats ok Ldweeks, if you can't be there you're welcome to come to it via IRC? Chris Cohen who is probably more of one of the main guys behind this is going to be involved over IRC as he can't make it for the friday.
Sounds good, yautja_cetanu. I
Sounds good, yautja_cetanu. I assume that you'll be in #drupal-churches on Friday, August 26th? And at what time?
http://london2011.drupal.org/
http://london2011.drupal.org/scheduleitem/drupal-crm-sprint
Are all the details, So it starts at 8am GMT and lasts until 6pm.
The Code Sprint will involve random people just doing their various things, however I think me and Rob are going to spend a little time planning so I'll e-mail you when we start writing things down. On the day, as I can't write any code, I think I'll spend it researching our competitors.
Hi Guys, We had a code sprint
Hi Guys,
We had a code sprint and I think we have the beginnings of a CRM in Drupal. I think our aim is to build the CRM as basic as possible such that specific implementations can be built on top of it. Our personal aim would be then to build a Church Management System out of that. Here is a brief summary: http://groups.drupal.org/node/171444#comment-570324
Going to try and work on this stuff once a week and so I'll keep you updated on how things go, I really want to try and get this to a point where all the people who said they wanted to help would be able to help a bit.
Also of note, Pomaking linked me to this: http://www.ccmag.com/cms/index.php?chartid=1
It is a pretty comprehensive list of software we're coming up against.