Now that I have figured out enough about Joomla to cause trouble I plan to start updating this site more regularly.
I started this project for my own church in 2004. At the time, I was searching primarily through commercial products, but the best match I could find for our needs was the open source project InfoCentral. The InfoCentral team was in the process of abandoning the PHP code, but it seemed incredibly useful to me. I started this project based on the InfoCentral code. Open source is wonderful! Since then a lot of people have come along to help, and the feature set has grown to incorporate a lot of great ideas from many different churches. We have installations all over the world!
The Fundraiser feature added in 1.2.12 was inspired by the annual goods and services auction at my church. This is our major fundraiser for the year, with members donating all sorts of goods and services to be auctioned off. There is a live auction and a silent auction. When the silent auction ends there are many dozens of purchases to record quickly before people start wanting to check out and go home. This past spring we had three workstations running simultaneously entering winning bids and checking people out. A new feature like this is certain to have rough edges, so please feel free to post your comments, bug reports and feature requests.
If you have a story about your church and the ways you use ChurchInfo please let me know. I would be happy to share your story.
Mike
Michael Wilt
ChurchInfo Team Leader