Care Network Attendance

Many years ago,  I and a couple of other friends designed a comprehensive church software package. Of course, it did attendance, but there were facilities for keeping track of who spoke in a service, what the message was, birthdays, addresses, and everything else we could think of that might have been of interest to standard church activities. (We even had tithing and offering tracking capabilities, even though I knew that our Pastor wouldn’t want that information in the same database.) We handed this design off to someone who was very well versed in Microsoft Access work, and he wrote a brilliant application, even though he was using Microsoft Access…

I finally badgered the then-current church secretary to use the program like it had been intended, and she was doing a good job at keeping it up to date. All the addresses, birth dates, and relationships between people were consistent. Then she abruptly left, and no one else would touch the application. I finally faced the fact that the program was too ambitious, and it got in its own way of being used.

So, having recently become familiar with writing PHP web applications, I decided to mock up an extremely slimmed down version that just did the attendance portion. I showed it to someone on my Treo phone, running from my development server at home, just for kicks. As it happened, the main screen was so simple, it fit within the width of the Treo’s screen. In fact, it looked as though I must have planned it that way. I showed it to my Pastor, and he showed enthusiastic interest. So I finished the program, and we used the application for many years. This version is hosted at GitHub here:

http://github.com/Dunkirk/Church-Attendance

(It doesn’t look as good on an iPhone screen.)

iPhone Attendance

Since doing all of that PHP work, I have done a bunch of Ruby-on-Rails programming. In fact, if you include some experiments that didn’t go anywhere, I’ve written about 10 applications in the last year and a half or so, some fairly involved. A couple are even done! At this point, in my mind, Rails is winning, but I continue to think that PHP is a perfectly viable language. (In fact, I have a calculation-intensive application I need to write, and I’m thinking that, with PHP’s speed advantage, I may try to write it with CakePHP. But I digress.)

The very first Rails app I tried to write was, in fact, a rewrite of this attendance program, just to learn the environment, since it was getting so much press. However, this was back in the 0.x days, and it was just a little too rough for me to get my head around. Now, though, the Youth Pastor at my church has asked me if he could use my old attendance program for keeping track of the youth attendance at our services for young people. The problem is that I wrote the old version for just one “network” of people. So I was going to have to make a major modification to support his request. Rather than do this, I decided to go back and try to rewrite the application in Rails again.

I’m making a note here: huge success. (Despite how long it’s taken me.) I need to get a new screenshot, but I’m realizing that I need to create a view for mobile browsers before bothering. Until then, the new version is also hosted at GitHub here:

https://github.com/Dunkirk/Care-Network-Attendance

New Attendance