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

131–140 of 323 posts

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

#131

Post by timmorgan »

sushimako wrote: post #94
dabernathy89 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

> I saw the "Install in the Cloud" option > ... > Unfortunately any church that wants to use this is going to need > someone technical enough to handle the installation themselves. I thought it would be awesome if that button would actually (eventually) result in setting up a droplet and installing the software for me. I think sandstorm[0] is going into that direction. I guess one tricky part of such infrastructure w…

I strongly considered building on DigitalOcean API and doing some sort of pre-built image where I transfer it to the customer or something. I'm interested in Sandstorm -- will check it out!

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

#132

Post by timmorgan »

socalnate1 wrote: post #111
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.

Hehe! I work for Planning Center! Our team is absolutely awesome, and the fact that they let me work on this stuff in my spare time is really neat.

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

#133

Post by cafard »

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…

The guy at www.midwesternmac.com has something like that, for Catholic, and also specifically Jesuit organizations.

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

#134

Post by EGreg »

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, this is a great job! I was particularly interested because I'm working on a platform for uniting communities, including Churches. In fact one of our business developers is part of a megachurch, so we are hoping to have a very large community as a beta partner.

Reach out to me if you'd like to discuss ideas back and forth -- we might be able to help you, and you might be able to help us.

About charging or not charging, I would say this ... even open source projects need resources to attract others to the community, and especially to gain adoption. You still have to do sales in Churches, and market to them. Churches, just like other organizations, are run by people who are averse to just trying anything they come across, and you need to have a good onboarding process.

In any case, if interested, you'll find my email at http://qbix.com/about (I'm Greg on there)

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

#136

Post by timmorgan »

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?

No reason that I can think of!

OneBody was birthed out of a church, so it's niche has always been that. There were no customer research or market position analysis here - just plain ol' scratching an itch!

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

#137

Post by und3rw4t3rp00ps »

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 :-)

Does it come in Synagogue?

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

#138

Post by qiqing »

timmorgan wrote: post #131
sushimako wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I saw the "Install in the Cloud" option > ... > Unfortunately any church that wants to use this is going to need > someone technical enough to handle the installation themselves. I thought it would be awesome if that button would actually (eventually) result in setting up a droplet and installing the software for me. I think sandstorm[0] is going into that direction. I guess one tricky part of such infrastructure w…

I strongly considered building on DigitalOcean API and doing some sort of pre-built image where I transfer it to the customer or something. I'm interested in Sandstorm -- will check it out!

Hey Tim,

Here's the Sandstorm demo: https://demo.sandstorm.io

The Sandstorm easy-port guide: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide

And accompanying blog post: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-05-12-easy-port.html

Hope this helps!

Jade

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

#140

Post by kentonv »

listic wrote: post #103
wspeirs wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could find someone to integrate it into Sandstorm: https://sandstorm.io/

Thanks for letting us know about such a thing! So, what exactly does Sandstorm do for me? Does it turn web applications into SaaS with individual instances of software per user without the user having to install it on their own hosting themselves? But there's a price to pay for that: each application has to be specifically ported to work with Sandstorm. Right? Where is the catalog of currently ported apps, then?

The idea is that each user has their own Sandstorm instance and can install web apps on it through a web interface, like installing apps on a phone or desktop. Be sure to try the demo -- it takes 30 seconds: https://demo.sandstorm.io

Apps require a little bit of porting, but not much. Sandstorm implements a native-code sandbox, so it can run any tech stack that works on Linux (no need to rewrite in a new language). The main things you have to do to "port" an app are:

* Packaging (gathering dependencies, specifying metadata).

* Removing your authentication/authorization systems and relying on Sandstorm's instead.

* If your app communicates with the outside world or publishes public web content, it has to use the APIs for that, since by default apps are isolated for security reasons.

There's some (work-in-progress) docs about how to port on the wiki: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki

The current catalog is at: https://sandstorm.io/apps/

Generally Sandstorm is meant for apps that deal with a single user's personal data and which act in federation with other users' personal servers. It can also work for data owned by a small group, but generally won't work well for anything that needs multiple machines' worth of resources (we'll support that eventually; it's just not the main focus right now).

Sandstorm is currently in alpha testing, with a first production-quality release expected early next year. We're also running a crowdfunding campaign: http://igg.me/at/sandstorm

Post reply on HN