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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

#111

Post by socalnate1 »

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…

Tim, you should check out the folks at http://get.planningcenteronline.com, they make RoR hosted church applications and seem like kindred spirits.

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

#113

Post by JonnieCache »

timmorgan wrote: post #61
jasonkester wrote: post #48

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 :-)

Why not just look for a partner? I'm sure you'd have plenty of takers. This thing is ready to start billing tomorrow by the looks of it. Then you would have more freedom to pursue your passions, while someone else deals with the customers for a percentage or whatever.

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

#115

Post by lotharbot »

[deleted] wrote: post #114
rblatz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is unrelated to the topic and unhelpful.

[deleted]

via https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."

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

#116

Post by danielweber »

JPKab wrote: post #82
timmorgan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Good for you man. But just realize that sadly, many churches operate as businesses where the pastor and his family just pocket tithes for their lifestyle and build fancy LED signs instead of giving to the poor......

In the past decade churches have moved towards explicitly having their books run by non-members. It takes away the temptation of members abusing funds, and makes the people in charge apply the normal amount of oversight on bookkeeping, instead of "he's one of us, he'd never steal."

PS I love the word bookkeeping and would love it even more if the "p" were doubled.

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

#117

Post by jimhart3000 »

afarrell wrote: post #108
dragonwriter wrote: post #52

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…

Saying that "church" can refer to other religions places of worship is like saying that "coke" can refer to other cost-drinks besides coca-cola. I've lived in upstate NY, Maine, and Boston my whole life and I've never heard anyone use "church" to refer to any non-Christian place of worship.

I grew up in the south where this is a pretty standard exchange at a restaurant:

"I'd like a coke." "What kind?" "Pepsi"

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

#118

Post by lotharbot »

JPKab wrote: post #82
timmorgan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Good for you man. But just realize that sadly, many churches operate as businesses where the pastor and his family just pocket tithes for their lifestyle and build fancy LED signs instead of giving to the poor......

I know a lot of pastors, and none of them have lifestyles that stand out in their communities.

The inner city churches I know all have food banks, clothing banks, free hot meals, or similar programs. The churches I know in Utah set up safe houses for women and children fleeing polygamy.

If you're connected to a church that operates as a business with the pastor taking home the profits, time to find a different church.

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

#119

Post by baddox »

netghost wrote: post #55
bencollier49 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's pretty common in churches. Each Sunday school group will submit a number, and someone will count attendance during the main joined service. The totals will be published in the next week's bulletin, along with total contributions from the week and perhaps year-to-date contributions. Some churches even announce those attendance numbers and compare them to the same week one year ago.

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

#120

Post by averyvery »

smacktoward wrote: post #71
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?

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 th…

I am a big fan of this comment - nice summary of the issue.
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