Gadgetopia

InfoCentral: A log time ago (like, four years), I wrote a piece of software called InfoCentral. It’s a PHP/MySQL app to manage church congregations.

“InfoCentral is a church management database written in PHP, using MySQL as its database backend. It is currently the only viable Open Source package for this purpose. Right now, InfoCentral only does basic tracking of membership, families, and groups. However, we and others are working on adding functionality to handle contributions, group member attributes, and many other things.”

I open-sourced it, continued working on it as long as I could, then handed it off to Chris over at OpenServe. He just released version 1.2.4 with some great additions.

Check out the screenshots — it’s come a long way since I handed it over 18 months ago. It’s been nice to see how developers have rallied around it. One guy even bought the domain name for the project at his own expense.

InfoCentral has been a great example of how open-source can work and solve real problems. It’s installed a bunch of churches, and one guy was even using it to track families of state police officers and fire fighters killed in the line-of-duty.

InfoCentral is one of the brighter spots in my programming career.