Cobblestone Community Network, a new social application for your ministry or church, has recently been launched into the wild and if the screenshots are telling of anything, it looks pretty well put together.
A paid service, there are a few options for purchase and it should be able to meet most of your social networking needs:
- Helping People find opportunities to Serve
- Connecting People into Community
- Creating effective and powerful Communication channels
- Managing Events
- Discipleship and Accountability Groups
- and many more features.
From Goodmanson’s Blog Post:
Cobblestone is designed to move people deeper into real relationships.
Cobblestone automates much of the administration, for example it can automatically connect people into home groups based on your criteria, so you can spend your time in relationship not administrating. This powerful web application automates many of the processes to allow your people to focus on the relationships not the administration.
Sounds nifty.
Let me know if you’re going to use it! Love to see some more implementations.
Daniel_Berman says
Looks to be some wonderful software but like so many other church community software offerings, the serious fees still being charged I fear are going to limit adoption to large churches in North America and Europe at best.
Where is the "Wordpress" of opensource community software? You have already listed a couple like buddypress, and ellg but I fear both of these projects have a fair amount of atleast theme development to go before they will reach the same level of finesse as Cobble Stone.
stephenbateman says
These guys take a lot of work…free is tough.
human3rror says
yes.
human3rror says
we should build a project team or something. wouldn't that be hawt?
Daniel_Berman says
Its something to consider; a community like this is a prime seedbed for a project like this. We have the interest, the scope, probably the developers in the 1700 odd readers of this publication, and your connections with Northpoint and LifeChurch. I am sure there are a number of people who would be willing to be an alpha testing theme, including myself.
human3rror says
sweet. let's talk about it and brainstorm…
Eric Granata says
Name a time and place. I'm all over it.
Daniel_Berman says
Where, when, how?
human3rror says
i'm thinking. we'll move forward with something.
sdesocio says
I think the problem with elgg is documentation. Its got a pretty steep leaning curve. I learned how to work with wp and Joomla in a pretty short time, but Ive messed with elgg and it feels really cramped. the fact that user import/export are weird is a set back.
human3rror says
elgg is very hard to learn. agreed on that.
Eric Granata says
I use Church Community Builder now and have been begging them for social media integration like this. I also like that it integrates so tightly with Eklesia 360. Now, an OpenSource version built on WordPress that ran the ChMS and the website would be killer.
human3rror says
sweet. stay tuned. let's cook something.