Dear Dev list,
Jonathan encouraged me to send this to the whole dev list in hopes some of you would kindly respond with comments. I am all ears!
1) I am building community websites for churches. I do it in my spare time for free. I am not a web programmer, but I am technical enough to be able to do Sys admin/ installation type work. We are using the Open-Source software: HTTP://Postnuke.com
My first question is....is there a PHP front-end to the sword project? Do you know anyone that would be willing to build one? Is there maybe some other PHP option for interfacing with the diatheke/CLI command line interface. Secondly, how is the sword project software installed for web applications that don't use CGI? For instance, how have people accessed it when running M$ ASP? Does it work much like a flat file database in terms of the front end making calls to it, etc.? Where does all the data go within the web server directory...i.e. will any old host do?
2) This is more of a theory question than anything else. I hope to launch a site by end of the summer called OpenSourceChurch.com It will be a site for the promotion of "free" software and knowledge resources amongst the body of Christ. The focus will not just be within the dev community. My ultimate end goal is to gather together the world's Christian hackers to work on a select number of projects, including:
a) A specialized Content Management System distribution (probably based on Postnuke),
b) a church/donor management solution (probably based on http://www.compiere.org/ or http://www.gnuenterprise.org/),
c) a ministry management solution (using the baseline of an open-source trouble ticket system), and
d) some type of web-filtering software (much like "Websense").
All but the last will be web based.
I also would like to promote open-source documents and knowledge. I wonder if some of you could share with me a bit of your vision for making various information forms available freely to the global church. Also, how do you think I should position the website and how might I attract the best programmers and project managers for this work?
Many thanks in advance for all your comments. I am truly open for this to be whatever it is meant to be!
Graciously yours,
Jason Reynolds
Telecommunications Manager-IT
Insight for Living
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
