[CS-FSLUG] Missionary Contacts Program - Come Help :-)

[Ritchie, Josiah S.]

For those not following my blog, I'm a candidate missionary with
Fellowship International Mission (FIM). I'd be taking over the support
of their website and all things technical. That means I'm doing the
deputation thing, raising support in the form of prayers and funds.
Details on all that are at the site I put up for the occasion:
http://missions.ritchietribe.net <http://missions.ritchietribe.net/> . 

 

With that in mind, I'm in need of a good linux or web-based program for
managing contacts with churches and people. There is a free program
called TNTMPD available for Windows that I looked at. My initial
impression was that it was overly complicated. Maybe I'd change my mind
about that once I finally got around to really using it, but I'm not
going to because it only runs on Windows.

 

I have started using my limited ruby knowledge on a Ruby on Rails
program that would seem to fit the bill, at least to start. I'm calling
in theMCP (Missionary Contacts Program. Yes, that's a reference to tron
also. :-) I'm wondering if there are any other rubyists on the list that
might take interest in this sort of a project. If so, I'd look into
sticking it online. I'm still trying to figure out how to get certain
boxes to look certain ways and stuff.

 

It has a MySQL backend and put together, at this point, almost entirely
using the scaffold creator in rails. My vision for a first usable
release is a very simple UI to allow the insert and removal of data from
the database. Then, I'd like to build on that some reports that would
integrate the data from various tables into useful packages. Maybe
something like a list of churches I've mailed a letter to and not yet
seen a response.

 

The long-term vision would be to see this reused as a service FIM (and
other mission agencies) could provide to their missionaries, so we'd
need to build in the ability to authenticate users and also identify
certain information as belonging to the user. I have no idea how to do
this from a programming standpoint so my current structure is based on
an individual.

 

If you have been thinking about getting into this and would like to mess
around, let me know. Maybe we can stick the project on rubyforge or some
such and to work together on it.

 

Don, is this something the freely project would take interest in or
somewhere else you've networked your way into?

 

JSR/

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