Open Source Church/Introduction

This book will illustrate open source software, downloadable from Github, useful for managing a church or parish. In particular, the functions of the ChurchCRM program will be analysed. ChurchCRM is released under the MIT license and installable both in a web hosting equipped with apache, php, mysql, phpmyadmin or simply on your PC as a standalone application via XAMPP.

ChurchCRM allows you to record data of people, families and groups who attend the parish and for each of these categories to establish properties, roles and classifications. For example for persons the roles could be head of household, wife, child etc., classifications could be member, visitor, guest etc., while properties could be disabled (specifying the type of disability), needs (financial, loneliness, need for assistance, etc.) and resources (bricklayer, lawyer, engineer, etc.).

For families, by creating one, its members can be entered immediately as people and as properties, for example single parent, single mother, etc.

You can then create all the groups that you want, for example Singers of the Mass, Parish choir, elderly group, Caritas Listening Center, Caritas Food Bank, Hospitality in Church, Musicians, Volunteers - visits to the sick, Scouts etc. People can be placed in multiple groups or moved from one group to another. The properties of a group could be youth, senior etc.

As regards data and reports it is possible to make queries of any type in order to search, for example, for disabled people, with economic needs, who have some resources, who are head of household, spouses, members, visitors, etc. and send emails to selected people. Other features are deposit management, fundraising and event creation...