Welcome to the ChurchApp Programming Wiki

The ChurchApp is a place to offer your input for potential Church Applications (ChurchApps). I would like to organize the applications in module form. Each module can contain ideas, designs, solutions, and program specs.

The idea is that the community at large can specify their needs, in an organized manner, and the companies providing programming services for the Church IT Community at large can respond to your needs. If you've always wondered, "why couldn't they just do " now is the time; You have the opportunity to detail how you would like it to be done.

Also an approach on how to accomplish these tasks can be to create web services that communicate structured data through XML/HTTP format using XML-RPC. I prefer the simpler XML-RPC format approach to SOAP that overly complicates matters in my opinion (but I'm open to what the community would like to do).

The key is to provide web services that can easily be integrated into someone's computer systems regardless of operating system. XML-RPC can achieve that goal.

ChurchApp Project List

Here is a ChurchApp list that needs to be written with a short description of the project or application. If you are interested in any of this or think you have a good solution post a message to the Church Management Systems Forum. Please feel free to add to this list below.

1. Open Source Church Management System Specification: Write up a Church Management System (ChMS) Specification (Spec) including Modules, Entities, Relationships, Applications, Functionality, and User Interface. The ChMS would be a design level Spec and would be Open Source. The idea is to describe the ideal ChMS, what it would look like, and how it would work.
2. Survey Program: Create a web program that can take a survey and collect the results and report them in a graphical manner (pie chart, bar graphs). This could also be useful for internal monitoring of service providers in your organization. After a service request is completed a survey could be given at random intervals to monitor quality of service. We would like the ability to collect both anonymous and registered user responses.
3. Centralized Church Contact DB: Need a centralized mailing list database manager for Church and Ministry contacts to facilitate printing of labels for mail-outs and email campaigns to promote CITRT. I don't see why all CITRT groups can't use the same database thereby keeping a centralized registry of all Church / Ministry organizations which we can keep up-to-date.
4. Create Lists Of Church Work-Flows: Identify standard work-flows (tasks) that people need to and what data is associated with those tasks.
5. Create a Church Database Schema: create a Church database Schema that can be used by all. The Project is being organized on ChMS LaunchPad -- ChMS Schema Blueprint.
6. Create a Database Generation Utility: a database utility that can generate test data for a church management system with data that looks life-like but is totally randomly fabricated. The tool can generate multiple different sets of data given the a different random-number seed. Also, the tool can also generate "bad data" that would simulate real-life data with duplicates and bad records (where inferior software would allow such records to exist in the database) This Project is being organized on ChMS LaunchPad -- ChMS Data Generator Blueprint.
7. Summarize / Outline Notes From the Church Management Systems Mailing List: produce an outline of discussion threads on the Church Management Systems mailing list and provide some structure to the information and ideas that are shared in the Church Management Systems discussion list. In the outline I reference links back to each of the relevant threads. I'm currently working on this as a Google Document: Notes on Church Management Systems.

-- JeffreyThompson - 14 Apr 2008