18 ms·

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

1020 points by timmorgan 12y ago

timmorgan 12y ago
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 http://church.io. Being specifically church software, it might not find much of an audience here on HN, but still, I'm proud, so wanted to post about it. Keep inspiring HN!!!
- toni 12y ago
  The screenshots look extremely polished. Good work! Is there anything specific that makes this a social network specially for churches? Maybe you should emphasize those points a little bit more? From 3 features listed in main page ("Directory", "Profiles" and "Groups"), only the screenshot for "Groups" contains something that makes me believe this is tailored at churches ("Prayer Request"). As I said you did a good job, just trying to give you constructive criticism :)
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    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!
    - bencollier49 12y ago
      Attendance tracking is a thing? That sounds nightmarish!
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - netghost 12y ago
        At a guess it's probably tracking aggregate attendance, ie: 60 people were at this service. Like page views in google analytics.
        baddox 12y ago
        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.
      - tjr 12y ago
        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-license/ccl-single/#pricing https://us.ccli.com/licenses-and-services/church-copyright-l... ]
      - timmorgan 12y ago
        It's used primarily by small groups that meet in homes or whatever - that way the church as a whole can engage with anyone who stops attending (sometimes sign of personal/life issues that the church should be there to help with).
        bencollier49 12y ago
        Genuinely fascinated by this. Wouldn't the members of the small group notice that someone had stopped turning up and drop them a line? Or does customer retention go up to corporate like a sort of Comcast "I want to cancel my contract" call?
    - kpapke 12y ago
      Great work Tim! Can you elaborate more on some things and see if I can use your app to replace some of our current tools? My church as a whole is actually using http://www.churchcommunitybuilder.com/ http://www.churchcommunitybuilder.com/ as a directory and it's not that fun to use, although some ministries within the church are more effective with it than others. I lead the digital video & post production team at my church and we are using a mix mash of Church Community Builder, Facebook group, Google mass email thread and an ugly spreadsheet to keep track of our volunteers attendance, schedule them and communicate the serving opportunities each week. How does the attendance tracking work in your app and would it work for something like this to track volunteers and schedule them to serve? One reason we have not moved off the CCB platform yet is they have a built in way for the church body to easily send online tithes & donations. Do you have any plans to work that in to your app? On a side note - I know Hillsong NYC is using this site http://get.planningcenteronline.com/ http://get.planningcenteronline.com/ for scheduling & announcements, and https://pushpay.com/ https://pushpay.com/ for payments. Thanks and again, great job with this!
      - timmorgan 12y ago
        I'm not very familiar with churchcommunitybuilder so I can't say. As for scheduling volunteer and such, you should definitely check out Planning Center Services app (that's what I work on for my day job) - it is by far the best app for that sort of thing. OneBody doesn't have any scheduling or giving stuff yet, sorry! About the only thing OneBody might do for you in your situation would be to help with emailing all your volunteers. You could put them in separate "Groups" (per time, service, whatever) and then email that group at once. Then you could track attendance in that after the fact.
- zerokarmaleft 12y ago
  Very nicely done...http://church.io http://church.io looks far better than any other option out there. In this case, I believe you are the inspiration. Keep up the great work!
- humanrebar 12y ago
  I've been talking to leaders in my church about the need for better organization and communication. I'll definitely check this out for our purposes. Thanks for posting it!
- atonse 12y ago
  Even though I'm not religious, this really looks wonderful. I'd be happy to recommend it to church-going coworkers and friends. Echoing zerokarmaleft, this time you are the inspiration.
- orn 12y ago
  This is great, not many people stick with something for that long. I will recommend to a friend.
- tcopeland 12y ago
  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-model.html 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/ http://www.alexandriapres.org/ for a few years (mostly running backups and such) and we certainly had a grab bag of solutions to the problems that church.io is solving nicely.
  - jakespencer 12y ago
    Fellow PCA church sort-of IT guy here. Couldn't resist saying hi!
    - tcopeland 12y ago
      Greetings! When I was IT guy at APC I called a bunch of local churches and talked to their IT folks. Was interesting to see all the variety. And of course McClean Pres was the most professional of the bunch, makes sense because they have like 25 people on staff, they have a campus of buildings to maintain, etc.
- jamesgeck0 12y ago
  Very nice. I've been asked for church directory software recommendations more than once, and this is much better than other software I've seen.
- jasonkester 12y ago
  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 clearly worth selling, then refuse to sell it. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few "church.io hosting" businesses spring up within a week if you don't build that option yourself.
  - humanrebar 12y ago
    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.
    - hnriot 12y ago
      Vatican City the 18th wealthiest nation in the world per capita.
      - shortstuffsushi 12y ago
        The Vatican in no way represents the average. They're about as far an outlier as you're gonna find. The parent comment mentioned specifically small churches with low budget/tech-phobia as well.
        hnriot 12y ago
        right, but the small churches are franchises just like Taco Bell. They all belong to a bigger church.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        > Vatican City the 18th wealthiest nation in the world per capita. Per capita stats for the State of Vatican City really don't tell much even about the wealth of the Catholic Church as a church. Its kind of live judging the wealth of the United States by dividing the assets of the federal treasury by the number of people who live in the White House and the US Naval Observatory.
- CoachRufus87 12y ago
  Very well done. Kudos!
- shortformblog 12y ago
  As someone with a lot of experience in the nonprofit space, I should point out that you would be able to take this over to membership groups that aren't specifically churches very easily. There are companies in the space that sell products like this to associations for tens of thousands of dollars. I realize your goals here are more altruistic in nature, and that's to be greatly respected, but it's certainly worth pointing out.
- davidcollantes 12y ago
  Tim, you built something amazing. It looks beautiful! Thank you.
- socalnate1 12y ago
  Tim, you should check out the folks at http://get.planningcenteronline.com http://get.planningcenteronline.com, they make RoR hosted church applications and seem like kindred spirits.
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    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.
- ernsheong 12y ago
  Hello from Malaysia! Thanks for the amazing effort and perseverance! We shall see if my church is interested!
- cafard 12y ago
  The guy at www.midwesternmac.com has something like that, for Catholic, and also specifically Jesuit organizations.
- EGreg 12y ago
  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 http://qbix.com/about (I'm Greg on there)
- callmeed 12y ago
  Great job, Tim. Looks really solid. I really think you should team up with someone to offer hosted versions of this to churches (take the WordPress model). My church uses The City [0] which charges anywhere from $20 to hundreds of dollars a month. It works well but I definitely think there's room for others. Also, Zondervan acquired The City from the developer/Mars Hill (he was an Amazon engineer too IIRC). I also think it would be huge to let churches connect a Stripe account and add giving via cc. Anyway, I think this is awesome and I respect your passion. If you ever need help with anything, drop me a line. [0] http://www.onthecity.org/pricing/ http://www.onthecity.org/pricing/
  - jashmenn 12y ago
    Our church also uses The City and I'd say it's fine but not great. There's a lot of room for another startup in this space - I've considered it more than once. The problem for me, on a personal level, is that it's very hard to mix business and the church. On the one hand, the technology used in the church generally lags far behind what is available and there are real benefits to the church body by having tailored technology. On the other hand, sometimes the new tech doesn't fit for cultural reasons. For example, it still feels unsavory to, say, pass a square credit card reader along with the offering plate. Additionally, one has to be careful not to be in it merely for the money (which becomes harder as the organization scales). At the entrepreneur you're torn between fiduciary duty to your organization/employees/investors and the (greater) responsibility to God and his church. It's really hard to keep that balance. Jesus did turn over the tables of the money changers, after all. In an ideal world your employees/investors are aligned with your vision but in practice, it can get really cloudy. (And we haven't even talked about if you're willing to sell to other denominations yet which, presumably, are using your software as tool to spread an ideology you explicitly believe to be false.) One model I think could work is for software engineers to found a non-profit and essentially raise funding/customer commitments from larger churches in order to build the software that they'll eventually use. That said, it's hard enough to find engineers who are "good" in the industry at large, much less when you add in the qualification that they have to be so deeply ideologically in agreement with your vision.
    - 12y ago
- milesf 12y ago
  Beautiful work! Thanks Tim. That's quite a gift to release something like this.
- jfc 12y ago
  Nice UI and a comprehensive app. Congratulations on a job well done! My only thought is that small to mid-sized churches may not have a Rails specialist, so a hosted option would probably be very popular.
  - r-s 12y ago
    I highly doubt many large churches have Rails specialists either..
- clarkm 12y ago
  Congrats Tim -- you truly are a software evangelist! Do you have any idea how many churches currently use the software? Are many of them based in Tulsa?
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    Probably < 10, but it's hard to know. The software (older version) has been open source for a long time and I've had dozens of people interested in it in the past. I should have installed a tracking pixel or something ;-)
- shoover 12y ago
  Well done, sir. I've always thought something like this was needed. Paid products are fine, but why not open source if a person or crew wants to take the time to build it with the polish required to pull it off? Well, you built it and it looks awesome. Plus it's refreshing to see something seven years in the making and testing posted here. News and speculation are always interesting, but this project has some weight to it. Thanks for posting.
- Squarel 12y ago
  Very nice, not something for me, but I have passed the link onto relatives who are involved in churches.
- steve918 12y ago
  Awesome tim. I remember seeing this for the first time when I attended the Tulsa Ruby group. The one and only time I went to that particular meetup group ;-P
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    Steve! Yeah that seems like a long time ago... Hope you are well!
- pekk 12y ago
  > Being specifically church software, it might not find much of an audience here on HN After a huge pile of upvotes and comments, do you still want to believe that HN has some kind of anti-Christian bias?
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    Oh, I didn't mean at all that HN is anti-Christian. I just didn't think that church software (a very specific niche) was all that interesting to the HN crowd. I'm very pleased with all the support!
    - __m 12y ago
      If you can make money with it, people at HN will love it.
    - mst 12y ago
      That's how I read it, FWIW. OTOH, you can look at it this way - 'self hosted social network for X' is the sort of thing the HN crowd seems to enjoy - and you're just a relatively unusual value of X :)
- sbank 12y ago
  Really awesome work! Looks very polished and thorough.
- Cameron_D 12y ago
  I've been asked last month to rebuild my church website. I'm going to show them this and get their feedback on utilising it, it looks amazing!
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    OneBody is really more for your "members only" area of the site, not the visitor-focused website. I recommend Wordpress for that :-)
- philipn 12y ago
  I just wanted to say that I've been following your work for a while now. I find it really fascinating! You've got a really active niche (if you can really even call it that!) and an interesting, polished, open-source project. Also, you seem to really care about design, which is an unfortunate rarity in the FLOSS world. I agree with the folks saying you should start a SaSS service. Even if it's extremely un-optimized (e.g. you spin up a new EC2 instance per-order), I think many, many churches would be interested. Hosting is a huge liability, time-sink, and all-around pain in the ass, and I think you'd do well enough to at cover your costs (at the very least!)
SEJeff 12y ago
This is great stuff, how do you "market" it? There are generally not a ton of tech people at smaller churches and then at the larger/mega churches, they have entire teams, which IME, love vendor software vs roll your own.
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Yeah I have no clue!! I'm struggling to find good places to announce this or generally make it known. CITRT (Church IT Roundtable) is a huge community of IT folks which seem to also include some devs, but I really don't know any other good places. Most of the commercial church software do heavy adword buys and sponsor church magazines and blogs and such. I have no means to do that :(
  - jeremymcanally 12y ago
    You should think of trying to setup at some denominational conventions if you're around a metro area with conference space. Having a simple table with some literature (even if it's just a single black and white sheet) would get it in front of people.
    - timmorgan 12y ago
      Great advice. I just have to get over my introvert hacker tendencies haha.
  - jackpirate 12y ago
    I just posted it to /r/Christianity for you: http://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/2bp1k8/onebody_is_free_open_source_church_directory/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/2bp1k8/onebody... You could probably talk to the mods and get it as a permalink on the sidebar. Quite a few pastors/bishops/other church leaders hang out there.
    - timmorgan 12y ago
      Awesome, thanks!!!
cheald 12y ago
I haven't dug into it yet, but that UI is really lovely. Really nice work.
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Thanks mostly to the MIT licensed (and awesome!) AdminLTE template. http://almsaeedstudio.com/AdminLTE/ http://almsaeedstudio.com/AdminLTE/ I really can't thank that guy enough!
  - nastysquar3d 12y ago
    This is a really nice looking UI. Thanks, I'll look into using it on some upcoming projects.
  - tesmar2 12y ago
    Have you are thought about making this project MIT licensed?
klausjensen 12y ago
I think you have done a very nice job with the design and clean user interface.
makmanalp 12y ago
Beautiful UI! Let me bring attention to one thing that's a bit tangential - I see that you have a "church directory" function. Please make sure that proper privacy settings are in place and people are prompted to opt in rather than are opted in by default. Especially in this case, registers for places of worship have been historically used to target minorities for their associations, nationalities and beliefs. Not saying this would happen in the US anytime soon, but better safe than sorry in my humble opinion.
JunkDNA 12y ago
This is really nice, I've often wondered about the dearth of such things every time I look at a church website. In the Catholic churches in my area, the company that prints the paper bulletin appears to also have something to do with the web hosting as well. I think many of them just go with that and slap something up there. Have you thought about actually using it to build a full-blown SaaS offering that churches can subscribe to? Similar to the WordPress model? There are a ton of Churches who probably would have someone who can set up a website, but not necessarily do the whole Digital Ocean VPS thing. I haven't explored this space, but I'd bet this is one of the nicest looking things like this out there.
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Yeah I understand 80%+ of churches probably won't bother to try to install something like this. I'll just be happy if anyone can get some use out of it, as it makes me happy to share. I would LOVE for someone to offer hosted OneBody -- I just can't do it because I have a day job and really dislike typical customer support. (Love helping other tech people and hackers, but am really bad at being patient with "customers".)
  - wspeirs 12y ago
    Maybe you could find someone to integrate it into Sandstorm: https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/
    - timmorgan 12y ago
      Cool! I wasn't aware of Sandstorm... will check it out!
    - listic 12y ago
      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?
maga 12y ago
What if my church is called a mosque?
- tptacek 12y ago
  Or a temple, synagogue, cathedral, monastery, abbey, tabernacle, or center? "Church" is just the generic English word for "place of worship".
  - sandyarmstrong 12y ago
    I don't think any non-Christian in the United States would agree with this. Not that there's anything wrong with sticking to a particular audience.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      One of the largest synagogues in Chicago asks people to contact its "church representative" to place advertising in its bulletin. You're much more right than I am, though. Certainly, non-Christian faiths in the US don't use the term "church" by default.
  - enraged_camel 12y ago
    >>"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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_of_worship#Christianity
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      "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.
aarongray 12y ago
Wow, that looks like some quality stuff. Nice work.
notjustanymike 12y ago
"You can see lots of screenshots here." - Amazing how many people forget to do that. Good stuff.
jscheel 12y ago
This is great work. I agree, the state of church software is absolutely appalling.
tptacek 12y ago
This is really nicely done. My parish seems really fond of phone services like CallingPost; you might be able to do some integration with Twilio to annoy other church people the same way. :) You might also consider an explicit obit feature, along with explicit features for weddings and baptisms, since those are the big "out of process" services (at least in Catholic churches) that need announcements.
- therealmegmurph 12y ago
  At Twilio, managing the Twilio.org program, I get inquires from churches looking to do just this - sms notifications for events, youth groups, etc. This is a stellar app Tim, congrats!
kyrra 12y ago
I know little about this kind of software, but a local church uses this site like it provides similar functionality?: http://www.onthecity.org/ http://www.onthecity.org/ Have you compared your project to this company's offering at all? I'm just wondering if they are even similar.
- chaostheory 12y ago
  It looks like the same type of software, give or take a feature or two or my opinion that OneBody looks way better than onthecity.com. The difference is that OneBody (or Church.io) is free and open source. OnTheCity is a SAAS which starts at $85 - $388 (or more) per month depending on the size of the church. This doesn't even include a "setup fee" which for some reason ranges from $99 - $499 (or more) depending on the size of the church.
stonogo 12y ago
I remember using this years ago to build out a private social network for a fraternal organization. It works very well even for non-monastic purposes!
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Awesome! It is true one could turn off and/or rip out the handful of church-focused features and it would stand as a fairly good member directory and private social network for close knit communities. Thanks!
cicero 12y ago
This looks very nice. I'm the technology director for a Catholic college prep school and we have been wanting to put up an online alumni directory, but the commercial packages we've seen are too expensive for our small school. I'm thinking your software could be adapted for that purpose, so I will show it to the lady who runs our web site and see if we can use it. Thanks for sharing your work with the world!
- mountaineer 12y ago
  Check out http://www.alum.ni/ http://www.alum.ni/ if you haven't already, built for alumni groups.
  - cicero 12y ago
    Thanks!
pvnick 12y ago
What a cool idea! Great job :)
davidradcliffe 12y ago
Looks great! A few years back I built a hosted product similar to this. It was only focused on groups within a church. This looks like it has a whole lot more to it.
esaym 12y ago
Impressive. I might use it!
joshaidan 12y ago
Looks good. One positive benefit I can see from churches using this is that they won't have to force their members to join Facebook to stay connected.
tdaltonc 12y ago
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?
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  I'd second the question in the form of a recommendation. From what I see in the screenshots, it seems like fairly minimal changes would also allow you to also pitch a variant of this as a tool for user groups, non-Christian congregations, and other such communities. Very nice looking tool!
- humanrebar 12y ago
  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.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  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.
  - averyvery 12y ago
    I am a big fan of this comment - nice summary of the issue.
  - 12y ago
trevorhinesley 12y ago
This. is. awesome.
breckenedge 12y ago
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).
- timmorgan 12y ago
  That would be awesome!!! I've been thinking about adding some scheduling stuff, so that could be a great pairing!
  - breckenedge 12y ago
    Excellent, inspiration for me to finish it. I've been working on abstracting/gemifying most of it lately, specifically for integrating it into other projects, so this is perfect. Not yet on Github. Thanks again for making your stuff public.
    - bithush 12y ago
      And that right there is what I love about open source :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jakespencer 12y ago
This is great! Are you aware of The City (http://onthecity.org http://onthecity.org)? Many churches pay $100/month or more for their similar, hosted solution.
- kraigh 12y ago
  I help administrate an instance of The City for my church, and it definitely is expensive and cumbersome. This FOSS solution looks like an awesome alternative, but is missing a few features of The City that would be hard to replace, like online giving, and childcare security (check-in, nametags, etc).
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    Yeah we don't have online giving. Check-in is being beta tested at my church though, so be on the lookout for that in the next version :-)
jpetersonmn 12y ago
This looks very nice. Maybe an Events feature? Maybe a backend admin type thing that can track offerings people are making, and then also a way to make an offering through the site if you can't make it into church that week. Really nice though, great work!
mrbman7 12y ago
Really slick! I want to get in on the development of this!!
zellyn 12y ago
Quick question: have you thought about porting this to sandstorm.io? Having a one-click "app-like" install would help out many less-technical church folks.
- timmorgan 12y ago
  I looked at Sandstorm, but it seems it's in "closed alpha" - how do you recommend I use it?
  - zellyn 12y ago
    I'm sure Kenton, who has commented eksewhere, can send you an invite. Although targeted at churches, your application is essentially a mini as of isle network, and would thus be a very interesting test case for sandstorm.
  - kentonv 12y ago
    Only our hosting service is in closed alpha. The source code is all open (https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm) and there's an easy installer script (though it requires a Linux machine), so you can start hacking any time. :)
jasonkostempski 12y ago
What exactly makes it specific to churches and not organizations in general?
- timmorgan 12y ago
  It has a handful of Christian church-specific features, such as personal "Testimony", bible verse sharing, attendance tracking, etc. If one were to take those features away, it would work for any close-knit community.
  - SandersonSun 12y ago
    Also, you could then monitor which events people go to, to see which ones lead to the most conversions, then optimise these. I'm really excited by using data to make our Assemblies more effective (though we don't have as clean a metric as baptisms!).
  - SandersonSun 12y ago
    Also, you could then monitor which events people go to, to see which ones lead to the most conversions, then optimise these. I'm really excited by using data to make our Assemblies more effective (though we don't have as clean a metric as baptisms!).
hockeybias 12y ago
Wonderful!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
beejiu 12y ago
Would it not have been more efficient to build a plugin for, say, BuddyPress?
- fiatjaf 12y ago
  Why not?
  - beejiu 12y ago
    Well, only 1% of the software "is Christian". The other 99% has already been created in various forms. I'm not criticising the project, I just don't know why he didn't extend existing software, or even fork something like BuddyPress.
    - timmorgan 12y ago
      Sometimes it's just fun to build something from scratch and make it awesome. Also, if I had built OneBody using PHP I certainly would not have lasted this long in keeping it going. Ruby is great language that I really enjoy using every day.
sjoerger 12y ago
Very neat. I think that with some slight tweaks this could be very applicable to home owners associations. This model could also be offered as a hosted version like someone else commented. (not that I really like HOA's all that much)
- spydum 12y ago
  For what it's worth there is a similar social networking site already out there with a lot of traction: nextdoor.com
Neff 12y ago
The site looks really nice and polished. I just passed it along to a coworker who handles most of the IT for his church. I know he has been kicking around the idea of spinning up an online directory and some social networking aspects for a while. You may have just saved him a lot of time!
joeclark77 12y ago
Have you got a demo site where somebody who's interested can log in and play around with its features? Two feature questions I can't answer by looking at the screenshots: (1) Does it have a way to highlight "Mass times" (or whatever), or is that just thrown into a general calendar with all the other events? (2) Does it have any way for the pastor to post messages to the front page in a prominent way, or is his user account just another user account? It looks outstanding -- keeping my eye on it.
- timmorgan 12y ago
  I put up a demo several hours after this comment. If you're still interested, you can find this on the http://church.io http://church.io website. 1. As for service times, the software doesn't really have any calendaring feature at the moment. Besides, that seems like maybe something that would go on the main church website (this is meant more as a private "members only" area). 2. Anyone can post news on the site (or you can restrict to only admins).
sjs382 12y ago
Hah, I'm using the same admin template for a project that I'm working on right now. :)
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  What admin template is that, please?
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    AdminLTE http://almsaeedstudio.com/AdminLTE/ http://almsaeedstudio.com/AdminLTE/
davidroberts 12y ago
I'm a pastor, and I'm technical, and I think I may just have found the Church Directory software we've been looking for! Thank you!
hipsterrific 12y ago
Nice app! Good to know there are other Christians here in HN. :P I've always thought about building something similar. Maybe I'll contribute, but my Rails skills is quite lacking (read: non-existant, I'm a C# guy)
arikrak 12y ago
Looks cool. Maybe you should change the name so it's not just focused on churches? Non-"church" denominations and organizations could use it as well.
- elwell 12y ago
  Or branch out several personalized versions for each faith/denomination.
  - arikrak 12y ago
    Yea, maybe I'll try one.
amcnett 12y ago
I myself am not blessed with the gift of faith, and I don't particularly enjoy Rails, but I greatly appreciate your making your very mature passion project available to one and all. Very impressive! I enjoyed: "It's like a cross between Facebook, Google Groups, and SharePoint, but it's completely free and open source and awesome." I especially like that it's awesome in addition to being completely free and open source, rather than _ just because_ it's free and open source.
mikepence 12y ago
There is no god, bro, fyi. I suppose automating delusional groupthink is your thing, though, so have fun with it.
tesmar2 12y ago
Any chance to change the license to MIT?
- timmorgan 12y ago
  No, sorry. AGPL still allows a company to provide a hosted commercial service (which I encourage), while also ensuring said company doesn't keep improvements to themselves.
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    You are awesome!
squiguy7 12y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I am going to ask my church if they would be interested in using it. I could easily spin this up on a PaaS and get it up and running. Really neat and original software, kudos man.
x86_64Ubuntu 12y ago
It looks very, very pretty and user friendly. I can think up ideas, and imagine certain tasks and features, but I can NEVER make an inviting and warm UI.
ivanca 12y ago
Is a good software, I'm sure, but 500 points? Is this some sort of communal self-assurance humble-brag about being accepting of "religious software"? Or does everyone just really love ruby CMSs?
- smacktoward 12y ago
  I dunno about you, but in a forum where most of the discussion typically centers around fad-driven, closed source products that pivot every fifteen seconds, I find it kind of refreshing to see us talking about a product that 1) someone's been working on for seven years, 2) is clearly aimed at an established, recognizable audience other than "Bay Area techies", and 3) is open source.
- freditup 12y ago
  I know you got a lot of downvotes, but made me chuckle with the part about everyone just loving ruby CMSs. :) Honestly though, I think it's a combination of a few things. First, Christians (and other religious people) are used to being bashed on HN and other similar sites, so I'm sure they (which includes me) would find it cool to see a positive post on religion and upvote it. Second, I'm sure some non-religious people thought it was a good piece of software and good work. And third, I'm sure some non-religious people felt good about themselves for upvoting this (as you mentioned in your comment).
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Did you look at it? It's really nice work. That's why I upvoted it. I don't think we have to reach psychoanalysis to see why this is doing so well.
    - ivanca 12y ago
      We are techies here, we know someone could pack WordPress with a couple of plugins, stamp some theme and call it ChurchPress and it would be way faster, safer and more extensible than this. So yeah, 640 points do seems a bit ridiculous, and is going to reach 1000 without doubt, meaning hn crowd find this article just as relevant as snowden prime revelations.
patcon 12y ago
> true # everyone can read bible verses! must be my favourite code comment ever. :) https://github.com/churchio/onebody/blob/3cac22587627b7846eae16788fb92f3e2910e5ec/app/models/verse.rb#L133 https://github.com/churchio/onebody/blob/3cac22587627b7846ea...
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Thanks! The authorization stuff expects that method to be there, so just return true! :-)
- peeters 12y ago
  No love for the Apocrypha though it seems ;-). Not being Catholic, I don't know how much teaching is done out of those books, but this might reach a larger audience if the books to show were configurable.
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    OneBody is powered by another of my projects http://bible-api.com http://bible-api.com (https://github.com/seven1m/bible_api https://github.com/seven1m/bible_api), which just needs a little bit of code to return verses from the Apocrypha. If there's interest, I'd be willing to make it happen or show someone where to get started!
    - lukeholder 12y ago
      do you have the book of mormon available on that api?
      - dorian-graph 12y ago
        I'm guessing you're an LDS? I've always wondered if the church will release an API of sorts.. It would be nice to use for apps and who knows what else. A lot of the URLs on lds.org are quite SES/nicely formatted already, e.g. https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1973/10/behold-thy-mother https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1973/10/behold-thy-mo..., and if they just added the option to return it in a different data format like JSON that'd be neat. ;)
diminoten 12y ago
This looks fantastic. Truly a great app here if it works as well as it looks. If anything, I think you might be targeting too small of an audience with this. While I realize there's no incentive for you to make this change, I could easily see someone forking this and using it for any large-ish group of people united under any purpose, such as a PTA or soccer league.
simpsn 12y ago
Nice work, this is awesome.
Eiriksmal 12y ago
Wow, this solves _so many problems_ for me! I was dreading having to hack together some ugly CRUD solution for my own church's directory-management needs. Thank you so much for doing a wonderful job working on this over the years, and creating an open source solution to boot!
jtzhou 12y ago
Beautifully done. Thanks for selflessly putting all the code online as an excellent use of RoR.
vlucas 12y ago
Great work! I've been watching from the sidelines, and I'm glad you finally had a big public launch! OneBody looks really good from the screenshots. I started http://www.churchmint.com http://www.churchmint.com over 2 years ago, and I have not made any progress for a while now. Seeing your success and all these positive comments though has encouraged me quite a bit. There are still a lot of churches out there that are severely under-served by technology. Kudos to you for using your skills for the kingdom and donating your time to a good cause!
staticelf 12y ago
I wouldn't develop software for chuches since my opinion is that they are bad for society. Feels weird for me to wish you luck, since I want religion to vanish. But good job in making a sophisticated software, even if it was for a horrible cause. EDIT: I knew this was probably going to be downvoted. But I just want to say that I have nothing against this person. I just dislike religion but understand that other may not agree with me.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  From the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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." ... The sentiment 'religion is bad' is neither civil nor genuinely new/enlightening/informative. Please refrain from making such comments in the future.
  - beejiu 12y ago
    > The sentiment 'religion is bad' is neither civil [...] That depends on entirely on where you live/your culture. What staticelf said isn't offensive and he shouldn't be made to feel like he cannot express his opinion. Perhaps he addressed it in a blunt way, but there is a genuine concern about how such software will be used to 'monitor' or 'peer pressure' church goers, particularly children, who are ushered into religion. Having a 'social network' so that religion permeates even further into people's lives should be a concern for everybody, religious or otherwise.
    - lotharbot 12y ago
      My original criticism stands -- what he said was neither civil nor new/insightful. He absolutely should be made to feel that his comment was unwelcome. Your effort is better. It's even ostensibly on topic. Though I think your concern is overblown. In my experience, the vast majority of church "monitoring" in this way is pretty reasonable, in the "hey, haven't seen you in a while, is everything OK? Can we help?" sense. Complaining about it is kind of like complaining about sports fans having a facebook group -- yeah, it's possible that someone can get upset because you're not showing proper loyalty, but practically speaking that's not how it's used. (Except by cults, who don't need this kind of software to control you anyway.)
fiatjaf 12y ago
I don't understand what does the software do. It is a "group manager" for churches? Something like Facebook Groups or many others of the same kind? I really liked the aspect of the app and that it was built, because I really think group management and group data is an issue, but WHY is it a problem when there exists Facebook Groups, email groups and lots of other solutions? Is church directory a totally different domain? Have I understood everything wrong?
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Yeah, I suspect a lot of churches could just get by with Facebook Groups and be happy. For our church, however, finding/begging people to join Facebook was a problem, and some people have privacy concerns, so having our own private social network has been successful.
  - SandersonSun 12y ago
    We had the same thing at Sunday Assembly. Some folk don't want to have their privacy revealed on FB. Also, it doesn't have great events functionality so that attendees can create their own events.
ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
This looks simply fantastic. You clearly put a lot of thought into making it accessible to the non-technical user which means you really know the audience. Kudos to you on taking a passion project and turning it into something wonderful and sharing it with the world! (I'm also glad to see so much positivity in a thread that could have gotten gunked up. Just because something isn't your thing doesn't mean you can't appreciate a craft)
ytjohn 12y ago
This software looks great. I've actually looked at this before, but for a different reason. This is a space sorely lacking in options. My amateur radio club has no coherent roster. We've got a couple people volunteering time to take all the application forms at our secretary's house and put them into a spreadsheet. But I also have spent some time looking to setup an open source club membership roster online. I even started working on a flask application, but don't really have the time to bring it to completion. In my search I found various things revolving around subscription management and a lot of offline club roster type stuff, but nothing that really fit the bill. Most members pay their membership dues in cash, and we'd also like to denote officers of the club. My goal was that we could add members contact information in directly. If they had an email, then they would be able to use that to login. Alternatively, members could go on the site and register themselves, with a club officer validating and activating their account. Members can update their contact information at any time. Club officers can record membership dues and when the current membership expires. While a nice option, we're not really concerned with an ability to pay online or not. There should be privacy checkboxes: share my contact information with club members, share my contact information with with ARES (a 3rd party organization the club is affiliated with and most members are also members of). Finally, members that are authorized should be able to download a roster of members (which is really the whole point).
dustin1114 12y ago
It was refreshing to see something like this on HN. I'll have to look into it. Thanks!
boyaka 12y ago
I'm a complete Rails noob, can anybody help me understand why after installing this my app shows up without any formatting? http://imgur.com/pQ8wOdG http://imgur.com/pQ8wOdG I did notice that there was a Warning regarding different versions of libxml used for Nekogiri: $ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate WARNING: Nokogiri was built against LibXML version 2.8.0, but has dynamically loaded 2.7.8
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Depends on how you installed it... if you're running on your local computer, then it sounds like you're running in "production" mode without first compiling assets with `rake assets:precompile`. (See http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html for some more info.) Or just run it in development mode with `rails server`.
  - bartzon 12y ago
    Concerning installing, you might want to try out Omnibus (https://github.com/opscode/omnibus https://github.com/opscode/omnibus). We've used it successfully to create a full-stack installer for our Rails project, Codem. See https://github.com/madebyhiro/codem-install https://github.com/madebyhiro/codem-install.
  - boyaka 12y ago
    Sorry I didn't mention it, I followed the wiki install which sets up the production environment. Just noticed after seeing your post that there are pretty simple instructions for the development setup, if I just kept looking past the wiki link. I ran it in development mode first with the only hitch being I needed to re-run the mysql user/table creation with _dev, but once I did that the development started up flawlessly on localhost:3000. I then went back to the apache/production server and suddenly it looks a lot better, but I still have some missing images (FATALs in log for GETing assets still?). I'm still confused about how to point my rails server to production instead of development, but I'm completely satisfied that it is working perfectly with rails in development mode. Here's a screenshot showing the images missing on my production/apache/passenger setup: http://i.imgur.com/XVLz7lt.png http://i.imgur.com/XVLz7lt.png
jqm 12y ago
Churches suck. (sorry church goers). I won't go into all the reasons why. The reasons are well documented for those wishing to confirm.... or just go to a church of your choice half a dozen times to find out personally. But there are a few thing churches do really well. Social networking it one of them. Facebook is an anemic imposter compared to First Assembly. This app is awesome. There is a lesson for general society in here somewhere. You know... for those who have ears.
- jqm 12y ago
  Hehehee... Amazing. 15 seconds after the post the first downvote. Not surprising... no, not that. Just amazing. Self delusion is the first self replicating virus I suppose. And manipulation never dies.
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    For the record, I did not downvote. Curious if you had a bad experience in a church, or in general why the negative sentiment.
    - jqm 12y ago
      No, it's ok. I expected to be downvoted but I feel what I posted and believe it to be worth noting among the positive clamor. Yes, I did have bad experiences at church as a kid, I was forced to go, it was not a good place, but more importantly I don't approve of religion in general. I would likewise make a negative remark if a site promoting multi-level marketing, extremist politics, anti-vaccination, or something of this nature was on the front page of hacker news. I simply don't think these things are good. Not to be dismissive of your effort... your application is awesome. I don't claim to know everything nor what everyone should do, but this doesn't change my opinion about churches. Sorry for the negative attitude. But I do have it and it is worth pointing out at minimum *some churches do harm in the world.
      - timmorgan 12y ago
        I'm sorry to hear that. Certainly there are bad churches in the world. But there are many many more churches that are helping meet needs (physical, mental, spiritual) in their communities. I hate that you've only seen negative affects of religion when there is so much good in spirituality and community you didn't see. :-(
saj1th 12y ago
This is great news! Keep up the good work.
tomasien 12y ago
This is the most unlikely but deserving post to spend all day atop HN. Great, great piece of software, deserving market, it's just great. Our company was originally started to serve my co-founders church as well believe it or not (the church was worried that credit card fees were usurious and so he tried to build a solution). I hope you do commercialize it purely because it will spread and serve more people that way - doesn't mean you need to try to make a lot of money on it, but some level of commercializing helps sustain and spread a project like this.
c4urself 12y ago
Love it, looks really nice! Can't believe you stuck with it for 7 years! Great job.
robertmarley 12y ago
Thanks plenty for releasing this!
devOp 12y ago
Just for your information. There's is a simliar tool from Germany in german: http://www.churchtools.de/ http://www.churchtools.de/
axpence 12y ago
I am so impressed with your consistency over the years. Kudos and best of luck.
junto 12y ago
One thing I noted, (which I think is really awesome), is how you outline on the main Github page how to contribute and fix bugs. this kind of thing is really helpful in getting people to participate in open source.
aaronsnoswell 12y ago
Great work! This is really cool! My church currently doesn't have a system like this, but is definitely heading this way.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
AgathaTheWitch 12y ago
Really cool stuff. My mother's church would benefit from using this kind of software. They are a pretty disorganized. I like seeing labor of love side projects actually turn into something cool and useful.
sbussard 12y ago
It takes 1GB to run? dude I might have to port this to node
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Yeah, with Rails + MySQL, 1GB is best in my experience. I bet someone could tune it all to run in 512 MB, but for me, the difference in money isn't worth the extra effort. I'm not really sure how one would "port" a Rails app to a Node app -- the layout of the app and libraries you'd need would be completely different. I've built several small apps in Node.js and Express, and I have to say, debugging Node.js code is way harder than Ruby. If you do decide to build something, please let me know! I'd be interested in following your work.
vdaniuk 12y ago
Surprised about the community response in this thread that is silencing and claiming inappropriateness of criticism. It is strange to see here the glorification of the technological augmentation/support of a most insidious form of marketing -- religion. And this is for a community that slams marketing and advertising as often as it has an opportunity.
nathan_long 12y ago
Our church has members from age 0 to 80. Some of the oldest members have never used a computer, but we'd want to include their pictures in a photo directory. Does this software support adding pictures on behalf of someone? Can you designate "editors" or some lower-level admin ability for that?
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Yes, there is support for Admin users who can manage the entire system, or just part of it, depending on the permissions given.

1020 points by timmorgan 12y ago

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 http://church.io. Being specifically church software, it might not find much of an audience here on HN, but still, I'm proud, so wanted to post about it. Keep inspiring HN!!!

toni 12y ago
The screenshots look extremely polished. Good work! Is there anything specific that makes this a social network specially for churches? Maybe you should emphasize those points a little bit more? From 3 features listed in main page ("Directory", "Profiles" and "Groups"), only the screenshot for "Groups" contains something that makes me believe this is tailored at churches ("Prayer Request"). As I said you did a good job, just trying to give you constructive criticism :)
- timmorgan 12y ago
  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!
  - bencollier49 12y ago
    Attendance tracking is a thing? That sounds nightmarish!
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - netghost 12y ago
      At a guess it's probably tracking aggregate attendance, ie: 60 people were at this service. Like page views in google analytics.
      - baddox 12y ago
        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.
    - tjr 12y ago
      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-license/ccl-single/#pricing https://us.ccli.com/licenses-and-services/church-copyright-l... ]
    - timmorgan 12y ago
      It's used primarily by small groups that meet in homes or whatever - that way the church as a whole can engage with anyone who stops attending (sometimes sign of personal/life issues that the church should be there to help with).
      - bencollier49 12y ago
        Genuinely fascinated by this. Wouldn't the members of the small group notice that someone had stopped turning up and drop them a line? Or does customer retention go up to corporate like a sort of Comcast "I want to cancel my contract" call?
  - kpapke 12y ago
    Great work Tim! Can you elaborate more on some things and see if I can use your app to replace some of our current tools? My church as a whole is actually using http://www.churchcommunitybuilder.com/ http://www.churchcommunitybuilder.com/ as a directory and it's not that fun to use, although some ministries within the church are more effective with it than others. I lead the digital video & post production team at my church and we are using a mix mash of Church Community Builder, Facebook group, Google mass email thread and an ugly spreadsheet to keep track of our volunteers attendance, schedule them and communicate the serving opportunities each week. How does the attendance tracking work in your app and would it work for something like this to track volunteers and schedule them to serve? One reason we have not moved off the CCB platform yet is they have a built in way for the church body to easily send online tithes & donations. Do you have any plans to work that in to your app? On a side note - I know Hillsong NYC is using this site http://get.planningcenteronline.com/ http://get.planningcenteronline.com/ for scheduling & announcements, and https://pushpay.com/ https://pushpay.com/ for payments. Thanks and again, great job with this!
    - timmorgan 12y ago
      I'm not very familiar with churchcommunitybuilder so I can't say. As for scheduling volunteer and such, you should definitely check out Planning Center Services app (that's what I work on for my day job) - it is by far the best app for that sort of thing. OneBody doesn't have any scheduling or giving stuff yet, sorry! About the only thing OneBody might do for you in your situation would be to help with emailing all your volunteers. You could put them in separate "Groups" (per time, service, whatever) and then email that group at once. Then you could track attendance in that after the fact.
zerokarmaleft 12y ago
Very nicely done...http://church.io http://church.io looks far better than any other option out there. In this case, I believe you are the inspiration. Keep up the great work!
humanrebar 12y ago
I've been talking to leaders in my church about the need for better organization and communication. I'll definitely check this out for our purposes. Thanks for posting it!
atonse 12y ago
Even though I'm not religious, this really looks wonderful. I'd be happy to recommend it to church-going coworkers and friends. Echoing zerokarmaleft, this time you are the inspiration.
orn 12y ago
This is great, not many people stick with something for that long. I will recommend to a friend.
tcopeland 12y ago
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-model.html 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/ http://www.alexandriapres.org/ for a few years (mostly running backups and such) and we certainly had a grab bag of solutions to the problems that church.io is solving nicely.
- jakespencer 12y ago
  Fellow PCA church sort-of IT guy here. Couldn't resist saying hi!
  - tcopeland 12y ago
    Greetings! When I was IT guy at APC I called a bunch of local churches and talked to their IT folks. Was interesting to see all the variety. And of course McClean Pres was the most professional of the bunch, makes sense because they have like 25 people on staff, they have a campus of buildings to maintain, etc.
jamesgeck0 12y ago
Very nice. I've been asked for church directory software recommendations more than once, and this is much better than other software I've seen.
jasonkester 12y ago
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 clearly worth selling, then refuse to sell it. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few "church.io hosting" businesses spring up within a week if you don't build that option yourself.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  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.
  - hnriot 12y ago
    Vatican City the 18th wealthiest nation in the world per capita.
    - shortstuffsushi 12y ago
      The Vatican in no way represents the average. They're about as far an outlier as you're gonna find. The parent comment mentioned specifically small churches with low budget/tech-phobia as well.
      - hnriot 12y ago
        right, but the small churches are franchises just like Taco Bell. They all belong to a bigger church.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Vatican City the 18th wealthiest nation in the world per capita. Per capita stats for the State of Vatican City really don't tell much even about the wealth of the Catholic Church as a church. Its kind of live judging the wealth of the United States by dividing the assets of the federal treasury by the number of people who live in the White House and the US Naval Observatory.
CoachRufus87 12y ago
Very well done. Kudos!
shortformblog 12y ago
As someone with a lot of experience in the nonprofit space, I should point out that you would be able to take this over to membership groups that aren't specifically churches very easily. There are companies in the space that sell products like this to associations for tens of thousands of dollars. I realize your goals here are more altruistic in nature, and that's to be greatly respected, but it's certainly worth pointing out.
davidcollantes 12y ago
Tim, you built something amazing. It looks beautiful! Thank you.
socalnate1 12y ago
Tim, you should check out the folks at http://get.planningcenteronline.com http://get.planningcenteronline.com, they make RoR hosted church applications and seem like kindred spirits.
- timmorgan 12y ago
  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.
ernsheong 12y ago
Hello from Malaysia! Thanks for the amazing effort and perseverance! We shall see if my church is interested!
cafard 12y ago
The guy at www.midwesternmac.com has something like that, for Catholic, and also specifically Jesuit organizations.
EGreg 12y ago
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 http://qbix.com/about (I'm Greg on there)
callmeed 12y ago
Great job, Tim. Looks really solid. I really think you should team up with someone to offer hosted versions of this to churches (take the WordPress model). My church uses The City [0] which charges anywhere from $20 to hundreds of dollars a month. It works well but I definitely think there's room for others. Also, Zondervan acquired The City from the developer/Mars Hill (he was an Amazon engineer too IIRC). I also think it would be huge to let churches connect a Stripe account and add giving via cc. Anyway, I think this is awesome and I respect your passion. If you ever need help with anything, drop me a line. [0] http://www.onthecity.org/pricing/ http://www.onthecity.org/pricing/
- jashmenn 12y ago
  Our church also uses The City and I'd say it's fine but not great. There's a lot of room for another startup in this space - I've considered it more than once. The problem for me, on a personal level, is that it's very hard to mix business and the church. On the one hand, the technology used in the church generally lags far behind what is available and there are real benefits to the church body by having tailored technology. On the other hand, sometimes the new tech doesn't fit for cultural reasons. For example, it still feels unsavory to, say, pass a square credit card reader along with the offering plate. Additionally, one has to be careful not to be in it merely for the money (which becomes harder as the organization scales). At the entrepreneur you're torn between fiduciary duty to your organization/employees/investors and the (greater) responsibility to God and his church. It's really hard to keep that balance. Jesus did turn over the tables of the money changers, after all. In an ideal world your employees/investors are aligned with your vision but in practice, it can get really cloudy. (And we haven't even talked about if you're willing to sell to other denominations yet which, presumably, are using your software as tool to spread an ideology you explicitly believe to be false.) One model I think could work is for software engineers to found a non-profit and essentially raise funding/customer commitments from larger churches in order to build the software that they'll eventually use. That said, it's hard enough to find engineers who are "good" in the industry at large, much less when you add in the qualification that they have to be so deeply ideologically in agreement with your vision.
  - 12y ago
milesf 12y ago
Beautiful work! Thanks Tim. That's quite a gift to release something like this.
jfc 12y ago
Nice UI and a comprehensive app. Congratulations on a job well done! My only thought is that small to mid-sized churches may not have a Rails specialist, so a hosted option would probably be very popular.
- r-s 12y ago
  I highly doubt many large churches have Rails specialists either..
clarkm 12y ago
Congrats Tim -- you truly are a software evangelist! Do you have any idea how many churches currently use the software? Are many of them based in Tulsa?
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Probably < 10, but it's hard to know. The software (older version) has been open source for a long time and I've had dozens of people interested in it in the past. I should have installed a tracking pixel or something ;-)
shoover 12y ago
Well done, sir. I've always thought something like this was needed. Paid products are fine, but why not open source if a person or crew wants to take the time to build it with the polish required to pull it off? Well, you built it and it looks awesome. Plus it's refreshing to see something seven years in the making and testing posted here. News and speculation are always interesting, but this project has some weight to it. Thanks for posting.
Squarel 12y ago
Very nice, not something for me, but I have passed the link onto relatives who are involved in churches.
steve918 12y ago
Awesome tim. I remember seeing this for the first time when I attended the Tulsa Ruby group. The one and only time I went to that particular meetup group ;-P
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Steve! Yeah that seems like a long time ago... Hope you are well!
pekk 12y ago
> Being specifically church software, it might not find much of an audience here on HN After a huge pile of upvotes and comments, do you still want to believe that HN has some kind of anti-Christian bias?
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Oh, I didn't mean at all that HN is anti-Christian. I just didn't think that church software (a very specific niche) was all that interesting to the HN crowd. I'm very pleased with all the support!
  - __m 12y ago
    If you can make money with it, people at HN will love it.
  - mst 12y ago
    That's how I read it, FWIW. OTOH, you can look at it this way - 'self hosted social network for X' is the sort of thing the HN crowd seems to enjoy - and you're just a relatively unusual value of X :)
sbank 12y ago
Really awesome work! Looks very polished and thorough.
Cameron_D 12y ago
I've been asked last month to rebuild my church website. I'm going to show them this and get their feedback on utilising it, it looks amazing!
- timmorgan 12y ago
  OneBody is really more for your "members only" area of the site, not the visitor-focused website. I recommend Wordpress for that :-)
philipn 12y ago
I just wanted to say that I've been following your work for a while now. I find it really fascinating! You've got a really active niche (if you can really even call it that!) and an interesting, polished, open-source project. Also, you seem to really care about design, which is an unfortunate rarity in the FLOSS world. I agree with the folks saying you should start a SaSS service. Even if it's extremely un-optimized (e.g. you spin up a new EC2 instance per-order), I think many, many churches would be interested. Hosting is a huge liability, time-sink, and all-around pain in the ass, and I think you'd do well enough to at cover your costs (at the very least!)

SEJeff 12y ago

This is great stuff, how do you "market" it? There are generally not a ton of tech people at smaller churches and then at the larger/mega churches, they have entire teams, which IME, love vendor software vs roll your own.

timmorgan 12y ago
Yeah I have no clue!! I'm struggling to find good places to announce this or generally make it known. CITRT (Church IT Roundtable) is a huge community of IT folks which seem to also include some devs, but I really don't know any other good places. Most of the commercial church software do heavy adword buys and sponsor church magazines and blogs and such. I have no means to do that :(
- jeremymcanally 12y ago
  You should think of trying to setup at some denominational conventions if you're around a metro area with conference space. Having a simple table with some literature (even if it's just a single black and white sheet) would get it in front of people.
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    Great advice. I just have to get over my introvert hacker tendencies haha.
- jackpirate 12y ago
  I just posted it to /r/Christianity for you: http://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/2bp1k8/onebody_is_free_open_source_church_directory/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/2bp1k8/onebody... You could probably talk to the mods and get it as a permalink on the sidebar. Quite a few pastors/bishops/other church leaders hang out there.
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    Awesome, thanks!!!

cheald 12y ago

I haven't dug into it yet, but that UI is really lovely. Really nice work.

timmorgan 12y ago
Thanks mostly to the MIT licensed (and awesome!) AdminLTE template. http://almsaeedstudio.com/AdminLTE/ http://almsaeedstudio.com/AdminLTE/ I really can't thank that guy enough!
- nastysquar3d 12y ago
  This is a really nice looking UI. Thanks, I'll look into using it on some upcoming projects.
- tesmar2 12y ago
  Have you are thought about making this project MIT licensed?

klausjensen 12y ago

I think you have done a very nice job with the design and clean user interface.

makmanalp 12y ago

Beautiful UI! Let me bring attention to one thing that's a bit tangential - I see that you have a "church directory" function. Please make sure that proper privacy settings are in place and people are prompted to opt in rather than are opted in by default. Especially in this case, registers for places of worship have been historically used to target minorities for their associations, nationalities and beliefs. Not saying this would happen in the US anytime soon, but better safe than sorry in my humble opinion.

JunkDNA 12y ago

This is really nice, I've often wondered about the dearth of such things every time I look at a church website. In the Catholic churches in my area, the company that prints the paper bulletin appears to also have something to do with the web hosting as well. I think many of them just go with that and slap something up there. Have you thought about actually using it to build a full-blown SaaS offering that churches can subscribe to? Similar to the WordPress model? There are a ton of Churches who probably would have someone who can set up a website, but not necessarily do the whole Digital Ocean VPS thing. I haven't explored this space, but I'd bet this is one of the nicest looking things like this out there.

timmorgan 12y ago
Yeah I understand 80%+ of churches probably won't bother to try to install something like this. I'll just be happy if anyone can get some use out of it, as it makes me happy to share. I would LOVE for someone to offer hosted OneBody -- I just can't do it because I have a day job and really dislike typical customer support. (Love helping other tech people and hackers, but am really bad at being patient with "customers".)
- wspeirs 12y ago
  Maybe you could find someone to integrate it into Sandstorm: https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    Cool! I wasn't aware of Sandstorm... will check it out!
  - listic 12y ago
    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?

maga 12y ago

What if my church is called a mosque?

tptacek 12y ago
Or a temple, synagogue, cathedral, monastery, abbey, tabernacle, or center? "Church" is just the generic English word for "place of worship".
- sandyarmstrong 12y ago
  I don't think any non-Christian in the United States would agree with this. Not that there's anything wrong with sticking to a particular audience.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    One of the largest synagogues in Chicago asks people to contact its "church representative" to place advertising in its bulletin. You're much more right than I am, though. Certainly, non-Christian faiths in the US don't use the term "church" by default.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  >>"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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_of_worship#Christianity
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    "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.

aarongray 12y ago

Wow, that looks like some quality stuff. Nice work.

notjustanymike 12y ago

"You can see lots of screenshots here." - Amazing how many people forget to do that. Good stuff.

jscheel 12y ago

This is great work. I agree, the state of church software is absolutely appalling.

tptacek 12y ago

This is really nicely done. My parish seems really fond of phone services like CallingPost; you might be able to do some integration with Twilio to annoy other church people the same way. :) You might also consider an explicit obit feature, along with explicit features for weddings and baptisms, since those are the big "out of process" services (at least in Catholic churches) that need announcements.

therealmegmurph 12y ago
At Twilio, managing the Twilio.org program, I get inquires from churches looking to do just this - sms notifications for events, youth groups, etc. This is a stellar app Tim, congrats!

kyrra 12y ago

I know little about this kind of software, but a local church uses this site like it provides similar functionality?: http://www.onthecity.org/ http://www.onthecity.org/ Have you compared your project to this company's offering at all? I'm just wondering if they are even similar.

chaostheory 12y ago
It looks like the same type of software, give or take a feature or two or my opinion that OneBody looks way better than onthecity.com. The difference is that OneBody (or Church.io) is free and open source. OnTheCity is a SAAS which starts at $85 - $388 (or more) per month depending on the size of the church. This doesn't even include a "setup fee" which for some reason ranges from $99 - $499 (or more) depending on the size of the church.

stonogo 12y ago

I remember using this years ago to build out a private social network for a fraternal organization. It works very well even for non-monastic purposes!

timmorgan 12y ago
Awesome! It is true one could turn off and/or rip out the handful of church-focused features and it would stand as a fairly good member directory and private social network for close knit communities. Thanks!

cicero 12y ago

This looks very nice. I'm the technology director for a Catholic college prep school and we have been wanting to put up an online alumni directory, but the commercial packages we've seen are too expensive for our small school. I'm thinking your software could be adapted for that purpose, so I will show it to the lady who runs our web site and see if we can use it. Thanks for sharing your work with the world!

mountaineer 12y ago
Check out http://www.alum.ni/ http://www.alum.ni/ if you haven't already, built for alumni groups.
- cicero 12y ago
  Thanks!

pvnick 12y ago

What a cool idea! Great job :)

davidradcliffe 12y ago

Looks great! A few years back I built a hosted product similar to this. It was only focused on groups within a church. This looks like it has a whole lot more to it.

esaym 12y ago

Impressive. I might use it!

joshaidan 12y ago

Looks good. One positive benefit I can see from churches using this is that they won't have to force their members to join Facebook to stay connected.

tdaltonc 12y ago

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?

TallGuyShort 12y ago
I'd second the question in the form of a recommendation. From what I see in the screenshots, it seems like fairly minimal changes would also allow you to also pitch a variant of this as a tool for user groups, non-Christian congregations, and other such communities. Very nice looking tool!
humanrebar 12y ago
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.
smacktoward 12y ago
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.
- averyvery 12y ago
  I am a big fan of this comment - nice summary of the issue.
- 12y ago

trevorhinesley 12y ago

This. is. awesome.

breckenedge 12y ago

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).

timmorgan 12y ago
That would be awesome!!! I've been thinking about adding some scheduling stuff, so that could be a great pairing!
- breckenedge 12y ago
  Excellent, inspiration for me to finish it. I've been working on abstracting/gemifying most of it lately, specifically for integrating it into other projects, so this is perfect. Not yet on Github. Thanks again for making your stuff public.
  - bithush 12y ago
    And that right there is what I love about open source :)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jakespencer 12y ago

This is great! Are you aware of The City (http://onthecity.org http://onthecity.org)? Many churches pay $100/month or more for their similar, hosted solution.

kraigh 12y ago
I help administrate an instance of The City for my church, and it definitely is expensive and cumbersome. This FOSS solution looks like an awesome alternative, but is missing a few features of The City that would be hard to replace, like online giving, and childcare security (check-in, nametags, etc).
- timmorgan 12y ago
  Yeah we don't have online giving. Check-in is being beta tested at my church though, so be on the lookout for that in the next version :-)

jpetersonmn 12y ago

This looks very nice. Maybe an Events feature? Maybe a backend admin type thing that can track offerings people are making, and then also a way to make an offering through the site if you can't make it into church that week. Really nice though, great work!

mrbman7 12y ago

Really slick! I want to get in on the development of this!!

zellyn 12y ago

Quick question: have you thought about porting this to sandstorm.io? Having a one-click "app-like" install would help out many less-technical church folks.

timmorgan 12y ago
I looked at Sandstorm, but it seems it's in "closed alpha" - how do you recommend I use it?
- zellyn 12y ago
  I'm sure Kenton, who has commented eksewhere, can send you an invite. Although targeted at churches, your application is essentially a mini as of isle network, and would thus be a very interesting test case for sandstorm.
- kentonv 12y ago
  Only our hosting service is in closed alpha. The source code is all open (https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm) and there's an easy installer script (though it requires a Linux machine), so you can start hacking any time. :)

jasonkostempski 12y ago

What exactly makes it specific to churches and not organizations in general?

timmorgan 12y ago
It has a handful of Christian church-specific features, such as personal "Testimony", bible verse sharing, attendance tracking, etc. If one were to take those features away, it would work for any close-knit community.
- SandersonSun 12y ago
  Also, you could then monitor which events people go to, to see which ones lead to the most conversions, then optimise these. I'm really excited by using data to make our Assemblies more effective (though we don't have as clean a metric as baptisms!).
- SandersonSun 12y ago
  Also, you could then monitor which events people go to, to see which ones lead to the most conversions, then optimise these. I'm really excited by using data to make our Assemblies more effective (though we don't have as clean a metric as baptisms!).

hockeybias 12y ago

Wonderful!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

beejiu 12y ago

Would it not have been more efficient to build a plugin for, say, BuddyPress?

fiatjaf 12y ago
Why not?
- beejiu 12y ago
  Well, only 1% of the software "is Christian". The other 99% has already been created in various forms. I'm not criticising the project, I just don't know why he didn't extend existing software, or even fork something like BuddyPress.
  - timmorgan 12y ago
    Sometimes it's just fun to build something from scratch and make it awesome. Also, if I had built OneBody using PHP I certainly would not have lasted this long in keeping it going. Ruby is great language that I really enjoy using every day.

sjoerger 12y ago

Very neat. I think that with some slight tweaks this could be very applicable to home owners associations. This model could also be offered as a hosted version like someone else commented. (not that I really like HOA's all that much)

spydum 12y ago
For what it's worth there is a similar social networking site already out there with a lot of traction: nextdoor.com

Neff 12y ago

The site looks really nice and polished. I just passed it along to a coworker who handles most of the IT for his church. I know he has been kicking around the idea of spinning up an online directory and some social networking aspects for a while. You may have just saved him a lot of time!

joeclark77 12y ago

Have you got a demo site where somebody who's interested can log in and play around with its features? Two feature questions I can't answer by looking at the screenshots: (1) Does it have a way to highlight "Mass times" (or whatever), or is that just thrown into a general calendar with all the other events? (2) Does it have any way for the pastor to post messages to the front page in a prominent way, or is his user account just another user account? It looks outstanding -- keeping my eye on it.

timmorgan 12y ago
I put up a demo several hours after this comment. If you're still interested, you can find this on the http://church.io http://church.io website. 1. As for service times, the software doesn't really have any calendaring feature at the moment. Besides, that seems like maybe something that would go on the main church website (this is meant more as a private "members only" area). 2. Anyone can post news on the site (or you can restrict to only admins).

sjs382 12y ago

Hah, I'm using the same admin template for a project that I'm working on right now. :)

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
What admin template is that, please?
- timmorgan 12y ago
  AdminLTE http://almsaeedstudio.com/AdminLTE/ http://almsaeedstudio.com/AdminLTE/

davidroberts 12y ago

I'm a pastor, and I'm technical, and I think I may just have found the Church Directory software we've been looking for! Thank you!

hipsterrific 12y ago

Nice app! Good to know there are other Christians here in HN. :P I've always thought about building something similar. Maybe I'll contribute, but my Rails skills is quite lacking (read: non-existant, I'm a C# guy)

arikrak 12y ago

Looks cool. Maybe you should change the name so it's not just focused on churches? Non-"church" denominations and organizations could use it as well.

elwell 12y ago
Or branch out several personalized versions for each faith/denomination.
- arikrak 12y ago
  Yea, maybe I'll try one.

amcnett 12y ago

I myself am not blessed with the gift of faith, and I don't particularly enjoy Rails, but I greatly appreciate your making your very mature passion project available to one and all. Very impressive! I enjoyed: "It's like a cross between Facebook, Google Groups, and SharePoint, but it's completely free and open source and awesome." I especially like that it's awesome in addition to being completely free and open source, rather than _ just because_ it's free and open source.

mikepence 12y ago

There is no god, bro, fyi. I suppose automating delusional groupthink is your thing, though, so have fun with it.

tesmar2 12y ago

Any chance to change the license to MIT?

timmorgan 12y ago
No, sorry. AGPL still allows a company to provide a hosted commercial service (which I encourage), while also ensuring said company doesn't keep improvements to themselves.
- aw3c2 12y ago
  You are awesome!

squiguy7 12y ago

Thanks for sharing this. I am going to ask my church if they would be interested in using it. I could easily spin this up on a PaaS and get it up and running. Really neat and original software, kudos man.

x86_64Ubuntu 12y ago

It looks very, very pretty and user friendly. I can think up ideas, and imagine certain tasks and features, but I can NEVER make an inviting and warm UI.

ivanca 12y ago

Is a good software, I'm sure, but 500 points? Is this some sort of communal self-assurance humble-brag about being accepting of "religious software"? Or does everyone just really love ruby CMSs?

smacktoward 12y ago
I dunno about you, but in a forum where most of the discussion typically centers around fad-driven, closed source products that pivot every fifteen seconds, I find it kind of refreshing to see us talking about a product that 1) someone's been working on for seven years, 2) is clearly aimed at an established, recognizable audience other than "Bay Area techies", and 3) is open source.
freditup 12y ago
I know you got a lot of downvotes, but made me chuckle with the part about everyone just loving ruby CMSs. :) Honestly though, I think it's a combination of a few things. First, Christians (and other religious people) are used to being bashed on HN and other similar sites, so I'm sure they (which includes me) would find it cool to see a positive post on religion and upvote it. Second, I'm sure some non-religious people thought it was a good piece of software and good work. And third, I'm sure some non-religious people felt good about themselves for upvoting this (as you mentioned in your comment).
- tptacek 12y ago
  Did you look at it? It's really nice work. That's why I upvoted it. I don't think we have to reach psychoanalysis to see why this is doing so well.
  - ivanca 12y ago
    We are techies here, we know someone could pack WordPress with a couple of plugins, stamp some theme and call it ChurchPress and it would be way faster, safer and more extensible than this. So yeah, 640 points do seems a bit ridiculous, and is going to reach 1000 without doubt, meaning hn crowd find this article just as relevant as snowden prime revelations.

patcon 12y ago

> true # everyone can read bible verses! must be my favourite code comment ever. :) https://github.com/churchio/onebody/blob/3cac22587627b7846eae16788fb92f3e2910e5ec/app/models/verse.rb#L133 https://github.com/churchio/onebody/blob/3cac22587627b7846ea...

timmorgan 12y ago
Thanks! The authorization stuff expects that method to be there, so just return true! :-)
peeters 12y ago
No love for the Apocrypha though it seems ;-). Not being Catholic, I don't know how much teaching is done out of those books, but this might reach a larger audience if the books to show were configurable.
- timmorgan 12y ago
  OneBody is powered by another of my projects http://bible-api.com http://bible-api.com (https://github.com/seven1m/bible_api https://github.com/seven1m/bible_api), which just needs a little bit of code to return verses from the Apocrypha. If there's interest, I'd be willing to make it happen or show someone where to get started!
  - lukeholder 12y ago
    do you have the book of mormon available on that api?
    - dorian-graph 12y ago
      I'm guessing you're an LDS? I've always wondered if the church will release an API of sorts.. It would be nice to use for apps and who knows what else. A lot of the URLs on lds.org are quite SES/nicely formatted already, e.g. https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1973/10/behold-thy-mother https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1973/10/behold-thy-mo..., and if they just added the option to return it in a different data format like JSON that'd be neat. ;)

diminoten 12y ago

This looks fantastic. Truly a great app here if it works as well as it looks. If anything, I think you might be targeting too small of an audience with this. While I realize there's no incentive for you to make this change, I could easily see someone forking this and using it for any large-ish group of people united under any purpose, such as a PTA or soccer league.

simpsn 12y ago

Nice work, this is awesome.

Eiriksmal 12y ago

Wow, this solves _so many problems_ for me! I was dreading having to hack together some ugly CRUD solution for my own church's directory-management needs. Thank you so much for doing a wonderful job working on this over the years, and creating an open source solution to boot!

jtzhou 12y ago

Beautifully done. Thanks for selflessly putting all the code online as an excellent use of RoR.

vlucas 12y ago

Great work! I've been watching from the sidelines, and I'm glad you finally had a big public launch! OneBody looks really good from the screenshots. I started http://www.churchmint.com http://www.churchmint.com over 2 years ago, and I have not made any progress for a while now. Seeing your success and all these positive comments though has encouraged me quite a bit. There are still a lot of churches out there that are severely under-served by technology. Kudos to you for using your skills for the kingdom and donating your time to a good cause!

staticelf 12y ago

I wouldn't develop software for chuches since my opinion is that they are bad for society. Feels weird for me to wish you luck, since I want religion to vanish. But good job in making a sophisticated software, even if it was for a horrible cause. EDIT: I knew this was probably going to be downvoted. But I just want to say that I have nothing against this person. I just dislike religion but understand that other may not agree with me.

lotharbot 12y ago
From the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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." ... The sentiment 'religion is bad' is neither civil nor genuinely new/enlightening/informative. Please refrain from making such comments in the future.
- beejiu 12y ago
  > The sentiment 'religion is bad' is neither civil [...] That depends on entirely on where you live/your culture. What staticelf said isn't offensive and he shouldn't be made to feel like he cannot express his opinion. Perhaps he addressed it in a blunt way, but there is a genuine concern about how such software will be used to 'monitor' or 'peer pressure' church goers, particularly children, who are ushered into religion. Having a 'social network' so that religion permeates even further into people's lives should be a concern for everybody, religious or otherwise.
  - lotharbot 12y ago
    My original criticism stands -- what he said was neither civil nor new/insightful. He absolutely should be made to feel that his comment was unwelcome. Your effort is better. It's even ostensibly on topic. Though I think your concern is overblown. In my experience, the vast majority of church "monitoring" in this way is pretty reasonable, in the "hey, haven't seen you in a while, is everything OK? Can we help?" sense. Complaining about it is kind of like complaining about sports fans having a facebook group -- yeah, it's possible that someone can get upset because you're not showing proper loyalty, but practically speaking that's not how it's used. (Except by cults, who don't need this kind of software to control you anyway.)

fiatjaf 12y ago

I don't understand what does the software do. It is a "group manager" for churches? Something like Facebook Groups or many others of the same kind? I really liked the aspect of the app and that it was built, because I really think group management and group data is an issue, but WHY is it a problem when there exists Facebook Groups, email groups and lots of other solutions? Is church directory a totally different domain? Have I understood everything wrong?

timmorgan 12y ago
Yeah, I suspect a lot of churches could just get by with Facebook Groups and be happy. For our church, however, finding/begging people to join Facebook was a problem, and some people have privacy concerns, so having our own private social network has been successful.
- SandersonSun 12y ago
  We had the same thing at Sunday Assembly. Some folk don't want to have their privacy revealed on FB. Also, it doesn't have great events functionality so that attendees can create their own events.

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago

This looks simply fantastic. You clearly put a lot of thought into making it accessible to the non-technical user which means you really know the audience. Kudos to you on taking a passion project and turning it into something wonderful and sharing it with the world! (I'm also glad to see so much positivity in a thread that could have gotten gunked up. Just because something isn't your thing doesn't mean you can't appreciate a craft)

ytjohn 12y ago

This software looks great. I've actually looked at this before, but for a different reason. This is a space sorely lacking in options. My amateur radio club has no coherent roster. We've got a couple people volunteering time to take all the application forms at our secretary's house and put them into a spreadsheet. But I also have spent some time looking to setup an open source club membership roster online. I even started working on a flask application, but don't really have the time to bring it to completion. In my search I found various things revolving around subscription management and a lot of offline club roster type stuff, but nothing that really fit the bill. Most members pay their membership dues in cash, and we'd also like to denote officers of the club. My goal was that we could add members contact information in directly. If they had an email, then they would be able to use that to login. Alternatively, members could go on the site and register themselves, with a club officer validating and activating their account. Members can update their contact information at any time. Club officers can record membership dues and when the current membership expires. While a nice option, we're not really concerned with an ability to pay online or not. There should be privacy checkboxes: share my contact information with club members, share my contact information with with ARES (a 3rd party organization the club is affiliated with and most members are also members of). Finally, members that are authorized should be able to download a roster of members (which is really the whole point).

dustin1114 12y ago

It was refreshing to see something like this on HN. I'll have to look into it. Thanks!

boyaka 12y ago

I'm a complete Rails noob, can anybody help me understand why after installing this my app shows up without any formatting? http://imgur.com/pQ8wOdG http://imgur.com/pQ8wOdG I did notice that there was a Warning regarding different versions of libxml used for Nekogiri: $ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate WARNING: Nokogiri was built against LibXML version 2.8.0, but has dynamically loaded 2.7.8

timmorgan 12y ago
Depends on how you installed it... if you're running on your local computer, then it sounds like you're running in "production" mode without first compiling assets with `rake assets:precompile`. (See http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html for some more info.) Or just run it in development mode with `rails server`.
- bartzon 12y ago
  Concerning installing, you might want to try out Omnibus (https://github.com/opscode/omnibus https://github.com/opscode/omnibus). We've used it successfully to create a full-stack installer for our Rails project, Codem. See https://github.com/madebyhiro/codem-install https://github.com/madebyhiro/codem-install.
- boyaka 12y ago
  Sorry I didn't mention it, I followed the wiki install which sets up the production environment. Just noticed after seeing your post that there are pretty simple instructions for the development setup, if I just kept looking past the wiki link. I ran it in development mode first with the only hitch being I needed to re-run the mysql user/table creation with _dev, but once I did that the development started up flawlessly on localhost:3000. I then went back to the apache/production server and suddenly it looks a lot better, but I still have some missing images (FATALs in log for GETing assets still?). I'm still confused about how to point my rails server to production instead of development, but I'm completely satisfied that it is working perfectly with rails in development mode. Here's a screenshot showing the images missing on my production/apache/passenger setup: http://i.imgur.com/XVLz7lt.png http://i.imgur.com/XVLz7lt.png

jqm 12y ago

Churches suck. (sorry church goers). I won't go into all the reasons why. The reasons are well documented for those wishing to confirm.... or just go to a church of your choice half a dozen times to find out personally. But there are a few thing churches do really well. Social networking it one of them. Facebook is an anemic imposter compared to First Assembly. This app is awesome. There is a lesson for general society in here somewhere. You know... for those who have ears.

jqm 12y ago
Hehehee... Amazing. 15 seconds after the post the first downvote. Not surprising... no, not that. Just amazing. Self delusion is the first self replicating virus I suppose. And manipulation never dies.
- timmorgan 12y ago
  For the record, I did not downvote. Curious if you had a bad experience in a church, or in general why the negative sentiment.
  - jqm 12y ago
    No, it's ok. I expected to be downvoted but I feel what I posted and believe it to be worth noting among the positive clamor. Yes, I did have bad experiences at church as a kid, I was forced to go, it was not a good place, but more importantly I don't approve of religion in general. I would likewise make a negative remark if a site promoting multi-level marketing, extremist politics, anti-vaccination, or something of this nature was on the front page of hacker news. I simply don't think these things are good. Not to be dismissive of your effort... your application is awesome. I don't claim to know everything nor what everyone should do, but this doesn't change my opinion about churches. Sorry for the negative attitude. But I do have it and it is worth pointing out at minimum *some churches do harm in the world.
    - timmorgan 12y ago
      I'm sorry to hear that. Certainly there are bad churches in the world. But there are many many more churches that are helping meet needs (physical, mental, spiritual) in their communities. I hate that you've only seen negative affects of religion when there is so much good in spirituality and community you didn't see. :-(

saj1th 12y ago

This is great news! Keep up the good work.

tomasien 12y ago

This is the most unlikely but deserving post to spend all day atop HN. Great, great piece of software, deserving market, it's just great. Our company was originally started to serve my co-founders church as well believe it or not (the church was worried that credit card fees were usurious and so he tried to build a solution). I hope you do commercialize it purely because it will spread and serve more people that way - doesn't mean you need to try to make a lot of money on it, but some level of commercializing helps sustain and spread a project like this.

c4urself 12y ago

Love it, looks really nice! Can't believe you stuck with it for 7 years! Great job.

robertmarley 12y ago

Thanks plenty for releasing this!

devOp 12y ago

Just for your information. There's is a simliar tool from Germany in german: http://www.churchtools.de/ http://www.churchtools.de/

axpence 12y ago

I am so impressed with your consistency over the years. Kudos and best of luck.

junto 12y ago

One thing I noted, (which I think is really awesome), is how you outline on the main Github page how to contribute and fix bugs. this kind of thing is really helpful in getting people to participate in open source.

aaronsnoswell 12y ago

Great work! This is really cool! My church currently doesn't have a system like this, but is definitely heading this way.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

AgathaTheWitch 12y ago

Really cool stuff. My mother's church would benefit from using this kind of software. They are a pretty disorganized. I like seeing labor of love side projects actually turn into something cool and useful.

sbussard 12y ago

It takes 1GB to run? dude I might have to port this to node

timmorgan 12y ago
Yeah, with Rails + MySQL, 1GB is best in my experience. I bet someone could tune it all to run in 512 MB, but for me, the difference in money isn't worth the extra effort. I'm not really sure how one would "port" a Rails app to a Node app -- the layout of the app and libraries you'd need would be completely different. I've built several small apps in Node.js and Express, and I have to say, debugging Node.js code is way harder than Ruby. If you do decide to build something, please let me know! I'd be interested in following your work.

vdaniuk 12y ago

Surprised about the community response in this thread that is silencing and claiming inappropriateness of criticism. It is strange to see here the glorification of the technological augmentation/support of a most insidious form of marketing -- religion. And this is for a community that slams marketing and advertising as often as it has an opportunity.

nathan_long 12y ago

Our church has members from age 0 to 80. Some of the oldest members have never used a computer, but we'd want to include their pictures in a photo directory. Does this software support adding pictures on behalf of someone? Can you designate "editors" or some lower-level admin ability for that?

timmorgan 12y ago
Yes, there is support for Admin users who can manage the entire system, or just part of it, depending on the permissions given.