A new/old project
One of the things that I have been considering lately for my programming hobby side has been a web-based, perl based membership management system that also has the capability of helping track ministry visitations. The current programs are way too expensive for my small church (or my own personal donation) and don’t really offer what I want. I hadn’t found anything so had been thinking about how to design and write one myself.
Well, that “old” project got some new life this last week. While digging around in the whole PHP/MySQL world that WordPress opened up for me, I found an open source project, InfoCentral that was very much along the lines of what I was thinking. Unfortunately, the lead designer for InfoCentral had halted PHP development for a Java-based package. His prerogative. But since the code is open-sourced it is possible for anyone to take and fork the project in new directions (just keeping it open source). In digging further, I found two forks already existed. Of the two, Open Source Church (osc) seemed most intriguing and most alive.
So I started working with it and started taking notes of ways to fix it and and extend it. I also started corresponding with Steve McAtee of ChurchLedger.com who is the Project admin for it. The long and short of it is that I am now part of the team and have been fixing the bugs I find. Steve’s focus is on a tithing/financial module to it. My desire is a ministry visitation tool. There are other developers listed, but at the moment they have other parts of life that are taking their focus.
It has been great fun to not only learn a new language (though PHP is similar to Perl in many ways), but also to finally have a place to take some of those ideas I have had for years and have a place to work on them. And I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, 80% of what I want is already there.
Cool.
