
Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years - timmorgan
https://github.com/churchio/onebody
======
timmorgan
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!!!

~~~
jasonkester
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.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
maerF0x0
Or be an agent for change from within.

~~~
DonHopkins
Good luck changing the Church of Scientology from within. Or lecturing the
Pope about preventing AIDS by distributing free condoms, for that matter.

~~~
PakG1
I believe the current pope has gone on record saying that the Christian world
pays more attention to sexual issues than is warranted, when compared to other
issues that exist in the world. I'm not a Catholic, but am quite impressed
with this guy so far.

~~~
DonHopkins
You're awfully easy to impress, if only by the slight contrast to how
absolutely evil, horrible and immoral the previous pope was.

Not even the current "liberal hippie pope" is having much success changing the
Catholic Church from within, so what makes you think anyone who's not its most
powerful leader could ever possibly have any success? Anyone claiming they
haven't resigned from the Catholic Church in disgrace because they want to
remain inside to be an "agent of change" is totally full of it, and guilty of
perpetuating the problem.

Does it actually impress you that the current pope wasn't personally the
architect and prosecutor of officially covering up and perpetuating all the
terrible widespread sexual abuse systematically perpetrated by the Catholic
Church, who wrote and enforced the official church policy of protecting
priests who rape children, and excommunicating anyone who speaks out about it?
[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/17/religion.childp...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/17/religion.childprotection)
[http://thewe.cc/weplanet/news/europe/vatican/papal_evil.htm](http://thewe.cc/weplanet/news/europe/vatican/papal_evil.htm)

If the pope's desire to cover up sexual abuse is what you mean by "paying more
attention to sexual issues than is warranted", can you please justify why you
think the Catholic Church should pay less attention to their longstanding
issues of raping children and protecting the rapists from prosecution? And why
you think it's a good thing that the current pope doesn't think it's such a
big deal that requires much attention?

~~~
lotharbot
I see you're relatively new to Hacker News and may not have had time to fully
grasp our culture. While I value the experience of those who remember usenet
newsgroups, this is not usenet and we do not appreciate the same sort of posts
as might have been popular there.

Having looked over your comment history, I believe you may need to reread the
guidelines at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Take particular note of:

"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."

Also note that you have already been asked to stop trolling by one of our
moderators, dang, at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7644504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7644504)
.

------
tptacek
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
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!

------
makmanalp
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
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
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
Maybe you could find someone to integrate it into Sandstorm:
[https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

~~~
listic
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?

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

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

* Packaging (gathering dependencies, specifying metadata).

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

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

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

The current catalog is at:
[https://sandstorm.io/apps/](https://sandstorm.io/apps/)

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

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

------
breckenedge
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
That would be awesome!!! I've been thinking about adding some scheduling
stuff, so that could be a great pairing!

~~~
breckenedge
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
And that right there is what I _love_ about open source :)

------
tomasien
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.

------
davidroberts
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!

------
amcnett
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.

------
patcon
> true # everyone can read bible verses!

must be my favourite code comment ever. :)

[https://github.com/churchio/onebody/blob/3cac22587627b7846ea...](https://github.com/churchio/onebody/blob/3cac22587627b7846eae16788fb92f3e2910e5ec/app/models/verse.rb#L133)

~~~
peeters
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
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!

~~~
joeclark77
Part of the trick is that verses are numbered differently, for example, the
Psalms. And Catholic Bibles have more chapters in Daniel and I think Esther.
An API that would allow people to match verses across the two types of Bibles
would have to have some kind of durable primary key for each verse in addition
to its nominal address.

~~~
timmorgan
Ahh, I wasn't aware. I imported the World English Bible XML directly. I'll
need to investigate more...

------
cicero
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
Check out [http://www.alum.ni/](http://www.alum.ni/) if you haven't already,
built for alumni groups.

~~~
cicero
Thanks!

------
hipsterrific
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)

------
tdaltonc
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?

~~~
smacktoward
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.

~~~
hyperliner
Yes. Why buy a "vehicle" when you specifically need a "pickup truck."

------
stonogo
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
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!

------
jakespencer
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
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
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 :-)

------
joeclark77
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
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).

------
ChikkaChiChi
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)

------
SEJeff
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
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 :(

~~~
jackpirate
I just posted it to /r/Christianity for you:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/2bp1k8/onebody...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/2bp1k8/onebody_is_free_open_source_church_directory/)

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
Awesome, thanks!!!

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

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

------
jpetersonmn
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!

------
vlucas
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!

------
AgathaTheWitch
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.

------
devOp
Just for your information. There's is a simliar tool from Germany in german:
[http://www.churchtools.de/](http://www.churchtools.de/)

------
ytjohn
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).

------
boyaka
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
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`.

~~~
boyaka
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)

------
diminoten
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.

------
kyrra
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
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.

------
Neff
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!

------
Eiriksmal
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!

------
sjoerger
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
For what it's worth there is a similar social networking site already out
there with a lot of traction: nextdoor.com

------
junto
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.

------
squiguy7
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.

------
maga
What if my church is called a mosque?

~~~
tptacek
Or a temple, synagogue, cathedral, monastery, abbey, tabernacle, or center?

"Church" is just the generic English word for "place of worship".

~~~
enraged_camel
>>"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
"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.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>"Church" definitely is the generic English word for place of (particularly,
Christian) worship

Not particularly. _Only_. As in, the word "church" _only_ refers to Christian
places of worship.

Honestly it is pretty bizarre that you and tptacek are claiming otherwise.
Maybe we're talking past each other. I just don't know any Muslims who say
"I'm going to the church tomorrow," or any Buddhists say "I was at the church
yesterday". I also don't know of any Christians who refer to synagogues as
"churches."

Now, if you are saying that "church" means any _Christian_ place of worship -
as in, people don't differentiate between church and cathedral, which _are_
different things - then yes, I can agree with that. But that's not how I read
your comments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
zellyn
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
I looked at Sandstorm, but it seems it's in "closed alpha" \- how do you
recommend I use it?

~~~
kentonv
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. :)

------
davidradcliffe
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.

------
arikrak
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
Or branch out several personalized versions for each faith/denomination.

~~~
arikrak
Yea, maybe I'll try one.

------
fiatjaf
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
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
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.

------
joshaidan
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.

------
x86_64Ubuntu
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.

------
vdaniuk
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.

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

------
tesmar2
Any chance to change the license to MIT?

~~~
timmorgan
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
You are awesome!

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

------
sjs382
Hah, I'm using the same admin template for a project that I'm working on right
now. :)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
What admin template is that, please?

~~~
timmorgan
AdminLTE
[http://almsaeedstudio.com/AdminLTE/](http://almsaeedstudio.com/AdminLTE/)

------
dustin1114
It was refreshing to see something like this on HN. I'll have to look into it.
Thanks!

------
c4urself
Love it, looks really nice! Can't believe you stuck with it for 7 years! Great
job.

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

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

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

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

~~~
timmorgan
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
This is a really nice looking UI. Thanks, I'll look into using it on some
upcoming projects.

------
ivanca
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?

~~~
freditup
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
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
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.

~~~
tptacek
I disagree and further would be concerned that a comment like this says more
about you professionally than it does about the software we're discussing,
somewhere in the vein of "Stack Overflow? Weekend Project".

~~~
lotharbot
It's important to note that what to put into a project like this (ie,
requirements) is at least as important as the technical aspects. Part of the
reason for the massive upvotes is the software has most of the right features
for the job, which is actually quite rare in this arena.

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

~~~
timmorgan
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
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!).

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

~~~
timmorgan
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.

------
mrbman7
Really slick! I want to get in on the development of this!!

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

------
saj1th
This is great news! Keep up the good work.

------
robertmarley
Thanks plenty for releasing this!

------
esaym
Impressive. I might use it!

------
pvnick
What a cool idea! Great job :)

------
simpsn
Nice work, this is awesome.

------
trevorhinesley
This. is. awesome.

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

~~~
fiatjaf
Why not?

~~~
beejiu
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
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.

