Drupal integration with Parish Data Systems (PDS)?

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jsquyres's picture

Does anyone out there use the Parish Data Systems (PDS) suite of software? (http://www.parishdata.com/)

We use it at our church to manage all of our parishioner data (specifically, the Church Office application), and were wondering if anyone has ever tried to establish some kind of link between the PDS database and Drupal. Specifically, we'd like to be able to allow parishioners to create accounts on our Drupal site -- but only parishioners. For example, if account creation could be verified against a parishioner listing in the PDS database (or, more likely, an exported set of data from the master PDS database) in some way, that would allow us to know that all authenticated Drupal users are actually parishioners in our church.

The PDS data is in a proprietary database format, but you can create customized reports that effectively dump whatever data you want in a machine-parsable format. For example, you can create a report of the form:

first_name,last_name,zipcode,envelope_number

Which is a simple CSV kind of format. We were thinking that if we could automate the creation of this report, and then upload it to the web server every night, Drupal could use this CSV file to:

1) Verify new account creation by matching name/zip/envelope number (for example) against the CSV file. Reject any new account creation that does not have a matching entry in the CSV file.
2) Remove old accounts that no longer have a matching entry in the CSV file (via cron job or somesuch).

This is just one idea, of course (and I made up the field names; we haven't given much thought yet as to what fields we should use for verification).

We're interested in a (mostly) automated solution because we have 1500+ parishioners -- having a staff member dedicated to drupal account support is not really an option for us. Our thought is that if an automated procedure can handle the majority of parishioner account creations / deletions, a staff member can handle the human factor for the small number of parishioners that somehow fail the automated procedure.

Has anyone else done something like this, either with PDS or any other parishioner database kind of software?

I guess a more general question is: what do others do -- if anything -- to verify parishioner accounts?'

Thanks for your time!

Comments

Web connections to PDS church office

markwills's picture

We too also use PDS at St. Anthony in Tigard Oregon. I'm looking to move our web site to Drupal and am looking at the same type of feature.
So far there seems to be 2 paths. The first one is a reference on the PDS web site that reads as follows:
"Generate an online registration form for your church Web site to enable new members to register their families and existing members to provide updated information all from the internet. Receive email alerts when forms are submitted and import into Church Office. The importation process will screen for existing records automatically."

The second one is an add on product/service they offer called "connect"
http://www.parishdata.com/connects
This is an extra cost add on to PDS.

I'm looking further in to the first option

We've considered the email

jsquyres's picture

We've considered the email form route, but that's fairly unsatisfying for a few reasons:

  • It just doesn't seem that modern; younger parishioners (20-somethings) expect to have live access to their data and be able to update their profiles on web sites in meaningful ways (e.g., like you can with a normal Drupal profile, or on countless other sites).
  • Any emails that come in have to be handled by a person (e.g., a staff member). The staffers are already pretty busy with other tasks; it seems like a automated solution would be better.

We looked at Connect and it both wasn't exactly what we wanted and somewhat too expensive for us. This is why we were exploring a possible integration with Drupal.

Have you looked at User Import module?

FatherShawn's picture

The User Import module might take care of most of what you are looking for - especially if turn over at your church is manageable. You could set up Drupal to only allow admins to create accounts and use User Import to create the 1,500 accounts from a CVS dump from PDS at the launch of your site. Then staff would have to deal with new members as part of the existing workflow - presumably they are already adding and deleting members from PDS when they join or leave.

User Import will process via cron, but I don't know if it will block users - haven't tried that but it's worth exploring if you really need an automated solution and you can actually automate the PDS export/upload.

Drupaling in NYC since 2009!

Feeds API

Spark_man's picture

Feeds API could probably do it for you too ... I am not saying it would be "easy", but you might be able to get it to do regular (daily?) updates.