Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 323 posts

Re: Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

#51

Post by maga »

timmorgan wrote: post #28
maga wrote: post #18

What if my church is called a mosque?

The software is definitely Christian church focused because that's where we first built it, but no reason it couldn't be adapted for other uses!

I was more interested in your personal feelings about it, since the license doesn't forbid this scenario. I'm glad you have positive attitude toward it. Great work, Tim, thank you for it! Although I'm personally long lost for any church or shrine, I'm glad that local communities now have one more good tool to cooperate.

Re: Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

#52

Post by dragonwriter »

enraged_camel wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a temple, synagogue, cathedral, monastery, abbey, tabernacle, or center? "Church" is just the generic English word for "place of worship".

>>"Church" is just the generic English word for "place of worship". It definitely is not. I have no idea where you even came up with this. Heck, there are even groups of Christians who object to the use of the word "church" to mean place of worship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_of_worship#Christianity

"Church" definitely is the generic English word for place of (particularly, Christian) worship (or, similarly, for the actual worship services), largely as the result of it being the word used by the religious groups that were dominant throughout the entire evolution of modern English for their places of worship.

Yes, there are certain groups that object to that for etymological reasons because "church" also is the English word for the body of believers, and who don't use the word that way, but that doesn't make it any less a normal (and, in fact, the primary) meaning the word has in English.

Re: Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

#53

Post by humanrebar »

jasonkester wrote: post #48
timmorgan wrote: post #2

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. You can see screenshots at http://church.io . Being specifically church software, it might not find much of an audience here on HN, but still, I'm…

Why are you not charging money for this? At the very least, you should offer a hosted version of this (borrowing the wordpress.com/wordpress.org model would seem the best plan) so that non-technical churches could click a button and just have it magically spin up a website and start billing their card every month. Seems a bit silly looking in from the outside that you'd spend seven years building something that's cle…

There's nothing wrong with giving stuff away for free. Many small churches already have budget problems and phobia of change and technology.

But offering a completely optional hosted version is a good idea for churches with more money than technical prowess.

Re: Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

#54

Post by [deleted] »

bencollier49 wrote: post #49
timmorgan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groups is the main one, sure (it has "prayer requests"), but also attendance tracking, sync without outside church management systems, etc. I probably should highlight more of that stuff on the site... thanks!

Attendance tracking is a thing? That sounds nightmarish!

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

#55

Post by netghost »

bencollier49 wrote: post #49
timmorgan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groups is the main one, sure (it has "prayer requests"), but also attendance tracking, sync without outside church management systems, etc. I probably should highlight more of that stuff on the site... thanks!

Attendance tracking is a thing? That sounds nightmarish!

At a guess it's probably tracking aggregate attendance, ie: 60 people were at this service. Like page views in google analytics.

Re: Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

#56

Post by humanrebar »

tdaltonc wrote: post #47

Why can't a church use a general purpose social network framework? How are the constraints/feature-needs different for a non-church group? 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?

There are plenty of niche social networks out there. I don't see why having one for churches needs special justification.

That being said, being a churchgoer is a very distinct social experience. The types of relationships, the need to moderate at times, the sensitivity of some conversations, etc. It makes a lot of sense to me that you'd have a specialized tool for that experience.

Re: Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

#57

Post by tjr »

bencollier49 wrote: post #49
timmorgan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groups is the main one, sure (it has "prayer requests"), but also attendance tracking, sync without outside church management systems, etc. I probably should highlight more of that stuff on the site... thanks!

Attendance tracking is a thing? That sounds nightmarish!

I don't know every conceivable reason why a church would track attendance, but one reason: churches that use / sing "cover songs" (i.e., not public domain, not original compositions) need to pay licensing for the songs, and one of the variables on how much the licensing costs is the average number of people in attendance.

[EDIT: https://us.ccli.com/licenses-and-services/church-copyright-l... ]

Re: Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

#58

Post by dabernathy89 »

jasonkester wrote: post #48
timmorgan wrote: post #2

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. You can see screenshots at http://church.io . Being specifically church software, it might not find much of an audience here on HN, but still, I'm…

Why are you not charging money for this? At the very least, you should offer a hosted version of this (borrowing the wordpress.com/wordpress.org model would seem the best plan) so that non-technical churches could click a button and just have it magically spin up a website and start billing their card every month. Seems a bit silly looking in from the outside that you'd spend seven years building something that's cle…

While I don't think he needs to sell it, the hosted option is definitely something to look into. I saw the "Install in the Cloud" option and thought "Oh cool, they'll provision a DO droplet and install this for you!" Unfortunately any church that wants to use this is going to need someone technical enough to handle the installation themselves.

That said, it's open source - so anyone (including me!) is free to set this up.

edit: apparently at least someone is doing this: http://www.powerchurch.com/products/onebody/

Re: Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

#60

Post by breckenedge »

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).
Post reply on HN