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

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

#71

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?

Non-technical people aren't like technical people. They don't look at general-purpose software and think "hey, that's for me!" They look at general-purpose software and think "if that was for me, it would say so on the box."

For this reason, software that is specifically targeted and marketed into a niche/vertical will usually get more traction in that vertical than a general-purpose alternative, even if both have the exact same feature set. (Or even, in many cases, if the general-purpose alternative has more features.) People need that little push of being explicitly told that the software is right for them.

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 E…

>>"Church" definitely is the generic English word for place of (particularly, Christian) worship Not particularly. Only . As in, the word "church" only refers to Christian places of worship. Honestly it is pretty bizarre that you and tptacek are claiming otherwise. Maybe we're talking past each other. I just don't know any Muslims who say "I'm going to the church tomorrow," or any Buddhists say "I was at the church y…

> As in, the word "church" only refers to Christian places of worship.

That's not correct; e.g., the first definition from the full definitions at m-w.com is "a building for public and especially Christian worship".

In practice, there is more to it than that -- its not uncommon to be used generically and inclusively for place of worship, but you'd never (except through ignorance) use it for a specific place of worship except consistently with the usage of the group for whom it is a place of worship. (But the groups who use it specifically for their places of worhsip is also not the same as "Christian" -- it includes many, but not all, Christian groups as well as some, mostly newer, non-Christian groups.)

More relevant to the thread: the use of "church" doesn't seem to be about a place of worship, anyway, its about a body of believers, which is a use of the term which is somewhat less divisive, though still has the same generic for unspecified religions (though "congregation" would probably be better) and specific for some, mostly Christian, religions. So, its not an unreasonable single-word term to use in explaining the function of a generic product, though the complexities of the use and the emotional attachment that goes with naming issues around religion may make it problematic. Though, really, the name ("OneBody") of the product is far more of a specifically Christian reference than the word "church" in its description of purpose.

> Now, if you are saying that "church" means any Christian place of worship - as in, people don't differentiate between church and cathedral, which are different things

Well, this is far off the point of even this subthread, but the set of cathedrals is a proper subset of the set of churches in the way both terms are used by most groups that use the former term at all. That is a cathedral is a church that is also the seat of a bishop. So even outside of the generic sense, its proper to refer to a cathedral as a church.

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

#75
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

I agree, unless specifically qualified otherwise (such as "the church of the giant spaghetti monster" or "church of scientology") I would assume that the word church relates to a Christian place or group or one one of the many off-shoots (and a quick check of a dictionary seems to support that).

But...

> there are even groups of Christians who object to

That proves nothing though. For any X you can find a group calling themselves Christian who strongly object to X, many Christians think they "own" the word and concept of marriage and have the right to define exactly what it means, and so forth...

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

#77

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…

I recently had to do some data model changes on a Rails app which I've had running for about 6 years, some notes here: http://thomasleecopeland.com/2014/06/09/reorganizing-a-data-... Church-related IT is an interesting challenge - not a lot of money to be spent, and what money there is usually gets directed towards tracking contributions. I was the IT guy for http://www.alexandriapres.org/ for a few years (mostly run…

Fellow PCA church sort-of IT guy here. Couldn't resist saying hi!

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Glory to God! :-) It's just my passion. I really hope someone does build this as a slick hosted service. I don't do well dealing with customers :-)

It's lovely to see someone make something beautiful and useful for the sake of his own love and passion. We may not share the same love or passion but I admire your spirit.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Glory to God! :-) It's just my passion. I really hope someone does build this as a slick hosted service. I don't do well dealing with customers :-)

I like this honesty. Do what you love. If you love writing code and not dealing with business and selling stuff then write code and don't go into business.

PS. Nice app.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Glory to God! :-) It's just my passion. I really hope someone does build this as a slick hosted service. I don't do well dealing with customers :-)

Doing all of this based in your faith, conviction and altruism is admirable. you have my respect.
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