I am excited to tell you about an up and coming Church Management System.
An association of unaffiliated software developers, the Spark Development Network, is establishing an organization to launch an open source ChMS and framework titled: Rock ChMS.
Here’s their mission:
- Provide all Christian church and parachurch organizations an effective software solution for managing their daily membership operations.
- Create and nurture a vibrant third-party community for the development of extensible functionality inside Rock ChMS.
There are plenty of ChMS solutions out there, and with the latest sweep of buy outs and mergers, Rock ChMS looks to be a breath of fresh air.
Rock Church Management System
I was very encouraged to hear more about the vision of Rock ChMS as they compare it to WordPress.
I like.
Really like.
I’ve been thinking about goals, lately, and I keep bouncing back to the idea that we don’t often aim high enough.
If they’re aiming for a ChMS that rocks like a WordPress, they’ve set their sights on something worthwhile.
As for the developer group behind Rock ChMS, Spark Development Network looks good:
When combined, the current members of Spark Development Network represent more than 20 years experience with direct or indirect ChMS development, and are represented by artists, writers, and software engineers. Members are also active in their home churches and together bring a combined 20+ years of practical church management experience.
And that’s not all. In the first quarter of next year, Spark is looking to expand their core team by adding developers, technical writers and support technicians from various Churches both large and small.
Here’s a sneak peak look at the Rock Church Management System:
Nice.
I’m looking forward to see more from this ChMS solution that is aimed to be both easy to install and intuitive to use.
If you’re interested in joining the Spark Development Network team, you can look through the team’s current needs; you can also follow the GitHub link and check out the source code and activity, all, on their website.
[via Spark Development Network]
Peter says
I am an IT guy for a church and one of the projects that I’m working on is redeveloping our church’s web properties. In my humble opinion, I would rather use WordPress as opposed to RockCHMS. The reasons for that is because the WordPress community is awesome, there are plug-ins galore, and I’ll never be stuck dealing with just one company in case something goes bad.plus, there really are a plethora of other reasons.
I’m sure that this would be a great CMS for a church that needs a simple and user-friendly platform.
Eric Dye says
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough as I made the comparison to WordPress.
This is a Church Management System for people. It’s about people management, donor management, child check-in systems etc …
I, too, first found the ChMS term confusing as it is similar to CMS and some systems have some overlap in regards to event publishing.
Peter says
Sorry, my bad 🙁 I guess a ChMS is sort of like a CRM software (Customer Relationship Management)?
Eric Dye says
🙂
Jason Offutt says
Yeah, the whole CMS/ChMS acronym debate is confusing at best. What’s important to remember is that while Rock ChMS will do Content Management System tasks, it will offer a much more robust solution as a whole.
We’re starting with the mindset that it all must exist on top of a solid CMS platform at the ground level. But as we build new features, we’re adding much more. When all is said and done, it will behave more like a CRM (client relationship management) tool than a web CMS.
Thank you for the kind words, Eric. 🙂
Eric Dye says
So you’re saying it’s going to be awesome.
Got it 😉
Nick says
Right Eric. Although it will (does) have some CMS capabilities already in its pre-alpha stage, the goal is not to replace WordPress at all. It’s to be an extensible/pluggable Church Management System core. Churches can use it simply — out of the box — but other churches can fully customize, add/replace functionality, etc. as they deem necessary.
Eric Dye says
I’m really excited about this. Sounds VERY cool.
Chris Ames says
Well I am excited! It confuses me that more Christian developers aren’t solving church problems with open source tech solutions. Big kudos to Nick, Jason, and the team for putting their most valuable resource (time) and talents to work for our churches.
Eric Dye says
Word.
Chris Ames says
Now… in all honesty I am a little mystified at the choice of .Net over PHP. I love .Net! Don’t misunderstand. It is an under-appreciated platform.
However, if you want a to tap into a wealth of open source programmers, most are on the LAMP stack. And if you want to give Churches the widest selection of hosting options, and the best hosting prices (value)… most are on the LAMP stack.
I’m still excited! Can’t wait to see it in action! But a bit concerned that this will hold back momentum.
Nick Airdo says
Chris, PHP certainly has its army of developers and that’s totally great. It’s just that Jon Edmiston, David Turner, myself and Jason Offutt are primarily C# .Net developers and are much more efficient writing in that language — so that won’t hold back any of our momentum and we’re not preventing PHP devs from writing an open source ChMS on the LAMP stack. 🙂
Just to be clear, Jon and David are getting pretty good at writing real Church Management Systems – as this will be about their 3 or 4th time doing it. I’m not in the same league as them. I decided to join the project because they asked me to join and because I know if anyone can do it these guys can. I’ve worked with them long enough to completely trust their skills and more importantly, their vision.
Raoul Snyman says
Can we PLEASE have a real open source ChMS and ChCMS? One that doesn’t depend on a proprietary platform?
Chris Ames says
Raoul:
The source is open and the code is in a public GitHub repo. The compilers are free and hosting costs are equivalent to other platforms.
Were you looking for something more than that?
Raoul Snyman says
Yes. I don’t want to be tied to a proprietary platform. I don’t want to run Windows, for a myriad of reasons (for instance, it would mean *another* server with additional costs, when I have one already), I want to be able to run whatever platform I like with an open source system.
As the project lead of an open source app, I specifically made the decision to use cross-platform, open source technologies to write the app, so that people can use whatever platform they want to run it. And I’m talking about a desktop application here, not a web app, so that means that I have to make sure the app works on what the users are running, not what some server is running.
Chris A. says
Great thoughts! And I applaud your efforts, especially in the desktop environment where it is more challenging.
I tend to lean towards evaluate the human factors when making decisions. You’ll notice my comment above where I referenced the vast wealth of open source programmers in the non-M$ space. That’s a human factor.
Also, having 4 guys with passion around an open source project like Rock, and wanting to use tools they are proficient in, is also based on human factors because you can’t manufacture passion!
Raoul Snyman says
That’s why a cross-platform open ecosystem makes sense. If you use a proprietary platform, less folks are able to develop the application.
My project went from one person (me) to 6-8 developers on average, just because I moved to an open ecosystem.
Other open source folks might have been more than willing to lend a hand if they’d chosen an open ecosystem like PHP (though I dislike it) or Python or Java, than a closed ecosystem, because those open ecosystems don’t depend on proprietary platforms. You don’t need to run Windows to develop in Python, but you do if you develop in .NET.
Raoul Snyman says
I guess I’m also just dissapointed, because I’m looking for an open source ChMS, and every time I find one, it’s written in .NET.
I would LOVE to write my own one (in Python/Pyramid), but I just don’t have the time to. I already have my fingers in too many open source projects…
Jason Offutt says
Thanks Chris. I think you nailed it. The four of us are very passionate about OSS, but we also are really big fans of the MS stack. It’s what we know, and we personally like to build stuff in it.
In regard to being tied to proprietary platforms, that’s simply not the case these days. We’re building the data access layer with an ORM that supports multiple database engines. Believe it or not, .NET plays quite nicely with MySQL. I’m personally leading another OSS project written in .NET that supports both MS SQL and MySQL in tandem (http://github.com/jasonoffutt/grassroots). It could even support a NoSQL database if you wanted it to.
If you don’t want to run Rock in a Windows server, that’s completely understandable. If you still want to be involved in some capacity, you could always fork the project and add support for Mono (http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page).
If all that doesn’t float your boat, that’s OK too. We don’t want to get in the way of anybody else creating another system on a different stack.
We’re simply building a solution that will be as powerful as the more expensive solutions in this space. However, we want to do it in a way that we can build it collaboratively with other church developers. We’re all working for the same boss after all. 🙂
Jeremy Mavis says
I’m NOT trying to drum up business for another ChMS… but BVCMS is another open-source (freely available) ChMS to look at and develop for. In response to some other commenters, it IS really neat to see people open-sourcing their projects and giving them away. The rest of the community really benefits from this approach. I know our faith community does!
Jason Offutt says
BVCMS is a great system too. We actually just got to hang out with those guys at our church web/software development conference, RefreshCache (http://www.refreshcache.com). We all got a chance to meet and hang out with both David Carroll and Jeremy Simmons. They’ve got a great system, though it’s got a different approach than where we’re going with Rock.
I think BVCMS and Rock will be distinct enough to fill separate needs. BVCMS really doesn’t have a concept of a built in content management system, whereas at Rock’s core will be a CMS that we’ll be building upon to add church management functionality. I think as they mature, they’ll hit different ministry needs. BV could be more enticing to a church that already has an established web presence and just needs some API hooks to pull data from the system. And Rock will be more helpful to churches who need a more fully integrated solution.
Eric Dye says
I love this discussion.