After a couple of false starts, I was able to install the new church-admin plugin for WordPress that was featured in Church Crunch last week.
It’s good when ministers can develop software (and software developers ministers) and so I hope to encourage this project in the only way I can — to kick the tires and report openly on its strengths and weaknesses. And where it is weak and if you have the ability, I encourage you to offer constructive feedback to the project’s author, Andy Moyle.
It’ll take me a while to populate the fields with what would be a mockup content for a thirty-member church. I’ll post back when I’m done.
Download it here, if you also want to try it.
Very cool — put your church database in the Cloud. I’ll look forward to hearing your experiences with this plugin.
This isn’t the first church admin software on remote servers/on the cloud — ChurchInfo is older and more feature rich — but this is the only one that integrates with WordPress, so far as I know. That’s worth something, especially to small congregation that I suspect would make best use of it.
Scott, I loved the idea of having a WordPress-based database, in the hopes that I could then give small group leaders user accounts so they could update things themselves. But I’ve been playing with it, and it’s a little too thin on the features. If you want small groups to appear on your church calendar, you have to enter them twice (in small groups, and on calendar). Entering children’s names under a parent’s name doesn’t do anything with those names — you have to create separate entries for children (e.g., to put teens into a small group), and those new entries don’t link to parent entries. Also, I can’t get the rota feature to work at all, which is the one feature that I would really use a lot.
A nice start, but not yet ready for prime time — it lives up to its 0.31 numbering as being pretty much a beta release.
I figured the family-as-a-unit model (rather than families made of configurations of individuals) would probably be a deal breaker for some.
But let me try the rota function, to see if I can make something of it. Still might be good for a church under 35, though the SMS feature — the one I thought the most interesting — is for the UK. Not so much luck here.
Guys, glad you are trying out the plugin.
I’ll add getting small groups onto the calendar automatically as an option very soon
The bulksms.co.uk is international
I had thought about how to do families and stuck with the unit model for now anyway.- smaller churches are more likely to use wordpress as their cms.
I’m looking at integrating the rota with the calendar too
Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks, Scott, this is great to know about, and makes WordPress an interesting alternative to using Drupal/CiviCRM for church membership tracking.