Church Directories Online?

[tmreg]

Anyone use good software for this? Hopefully this is something I can integrate into our current site. I can write something, but surely this has already been done before. Any thoughts?

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Matt,

Please define what you mean by church directory. What is the goal or purpose?

Thanks.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey

[tmreg]

I am looking for a picture directory of members of the church. Our church publishes one every 6 years or so. I am looking for an online version of that.

I was looking for one that can be kept up to date and have a picture of the family, names and contact information. This should be a fairly standard database app but I have not been able to find one.

This would be in a password protected section of the website.

[Faithhb_lutheran]

Do you use a CMS, or is your site hand coded?

[tmreg]

I am currently using the CMS XOOPS. I am not worried about porting that over. I can handle that part. I am basically looking for a stand alone (maybe php based) program to handle this (think coppermine as a photo gallery). With that stand alone program, I can pretty easily wrap that into my CMS and have my user permissions apply.

The goal would be to allow new members (or old ones) to be able to put a "face with a name" more easily. It would also be searchable depending on whatever the user knows about the person (ie if a new member remembers meeting someone who works for exxon but forgot his name.)

Matt
http://churchthatcares.org

[Faithhb_lutheran]

Why I ask is that using a CMS you don't need a stand alone program. If you are using a CMS with login profiles you can let people update their own profiles and aggregate the whole thing into special pages that look like a directory. Less work is usually a good thing, of course that means you have to get people to fill out profiles.

[tmreg]

That sounds great, in theory, but it still amazes me how lazy people can be when it comes to filling anything out. We still can't get people to fill out an attendance card and put it in the offering basket on Sunday.

I was thinking stand alone program only because that is what I thought I had a chance of finding ready-made. Surely someone has come up to a solution for this?

If I have to build one, I will build it into my CMS.

[Danny Carlton]

This isn't a church site, but I run a site for people and families with a certain rare congenital condition. The condition is rare enough that few of the families ever get the chance to meet other with the condition. (I have two children with this condition and last weekend I, for the first time, met another parent of a child with the condition, even though I've ran the site for almost 10 years)...anyway...certain aspects of the condition also makes families very leery of strangers poking around. So we have the need for more connection, yet the need for privacy. The solution when it comes to photos is two-fold.

1. I asked for photos to place on the site logo, which are delivered at random with no names. I've had about 30 or 40 families submit photos. It allows them to see other faces, but with no names, which provides a bit of anonymity when strangers visit the site.

2. I used Gallery (http://gallery.menalto.com/) to allow them to upload photos with captions in a members only area.

That's so far solved the need for sharing and privacy.

[ruanole2]

I'm looking for a similar solution. But I'm looking for a password protected online directory. I've found www.123signup.com but similar services at http://www.yourmembership.com/products/features.asp cost a minimum of $295/mo. That's absolutely ridiculous as far as our needs go. So, I'm looking for an easier solution.

PS - I'm redesigning our site and will be using Adobe Contribute for updating.

[HansR]

Be ceratin to ask permission before you post photos or addresses of your folks!

[Websquad]

In my opinion, I would not post that in an area where the public can see it. There are privacy issues. With a head of household's name and a few mouse clicks you can have, on-line, (a) address (b) telephone number (c) a map to their home (thanks to MapQuest).

This may be OK in a rural area, but not in an urban area. On my church site, unless the people are church staff or folks that "are in the public eye," I use first names only, and hide all Email addresses with JavaScript to keep the Spam bots at bay.

I do have a "for members" only section that requires a userid and password, and in that section I feel free to publish anything. If folks try to access that section without the userid and password, they get a custom error page that directs them to call the church office, who can check their membership credentials to make sure its OK for them to enter.

[tmreg]

All of this would be password protectd and in the "members only" section of our site. We already have an extensive members section with church business, videos that we do not have a public license to, etc posted on there. I was hoping a php/mysql script existed already to make this easy. I am guessing nothing like this exists yet.

I understand the privacy implications and I am not going to publish this to the world.

These projects (a paper directory) are painful and take the better part of 6months to a year to complete (and are outdated almost as soon as they are finished). In my wildest dreams it could be as easy as taking a digital picture of the family and adding their info when they join or want to update. I would also like to have a way to print the directory to a pdf so if someone wants an up-to-date paper copy, they could just print one.

I am going to play around with a XOOPS module that is a database input-output module. It would not help everybody, but with me not being a coder, that will be easiest.

[JackWolfgang]

The following forum thread discusses some security aspects of the church directory, both printed and online:

http://osministry.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=2573&st=0&#entry20378

[flutem3]

Hi, yous guys and gals if you are there,

I have real problems with putting names and addresses, phone numbers, etc. on any website no matter how well it is protected. People tend to be careless with passwords....at least that is my experience.

If you give the password to each member of the congregation or each family, I doubt that it would be very long until other people had it as well. And if you made a super-duper tough password, nobody would remember it.

I understand how neat it would be to have a church directory on the church website because of the ease in keeping it up. However, at our church the directory is kept up on the computer by the secretary anyway so it is generally up-to-date.

I would also think if you were going to do this, you would want to get permission from the people in your church. I can think of three people in our church who would absolutely, positively NOT want their names and any kinds of information on our website...or any other website for that matter.
You are right. They do not like computers at all. One of the people has a nice one which is not hooked up to the internet. She uses it as a typewriter. She believes that evil comes from the internet and wants no part of it. Her kids and grandkids use computers, but she doesn't want a thing to do with them. Whether we agree or not, we need to honor the feelings of those people. Therefore, unless everyone in the church would agree, the directory would be incomplete. And I, for one, would not dream of putting someone's name in a directory when I know he/she is so vehemently against it. I think it behooves us to ask...even if we do not like the answer.

But my main feeling is that the directory would not stay private for very long.

Carol