Web enablement

[pbossman]

Hello, I found a discussion from 2003 about web enablement for power church.

We have a committee reviewing data management. Did anything come of your previous web enablement discussions?

The requirements I can think up off the top of my head are:
- Observing the calendar
- Scheduling and updating an event
- Data entry

Actually, I could make a case for doing everything from the web including administering users. But for the use of power church to take off, the use of the church's database to take off would be for users to be able to review, add, maintain the data from their homes at their convenience.

Anyway, I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing that there is a web interface that I've just overlooked.

Thanks,
Pat

[NeilZ]

Hello, I found a discussion from 2003 about web enablement for power church.

We have a committee reviewing data management. Did anything come of your previous web enablement discussions?

The requirements I can think up off the top of my head are:
- Observing the calendar
- Scheduling and updating an event
- Data entry

Actually, I could make a case for doing everything from the web including administering users. But for the use of power church to take off, the use of the church's database to take off would be for users to be able to review, add, maintain the data from their homes at their convenience.

Anyway, I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing that there is a web interface that I've just overlooked.

Thanks,
Pat

The main problem with that was you had to have a dedicated server to run this on, with a heck of a good firewall to insure that it wouldn't get hacked.

Many churches do not have the resources to setup that type of system. What I did at my last church was setup a GoToMyPC account that allowed authorized users access to a dedicated computer in the church network.

GoToMyPC utilizes a very secure system (Citrix) to create a virtual desktop on the user's machine. Its linked to the dedicate machine at church. This provided a way for people (Treasurer, Elders, Class Leaders) to access the machine from home.

The downside is that only one person could use it at a time, however, that was rarely an issue.

[troy]

If I'm able to get ahold of a copy of PC+ (For weeks I've been nagging the guy who has the software,) I have plans to use an ODBC connection for a read-only interface, probably for nightly data export. This is so we can use membership data on an intranet-style application and event data on the web site. I'll make it known if I make progress on this.

Using a read-only interface for dumping data is significantly simpler and there are fewer security issues. Of course, you don't gain the benefits of remote data entry.

God's Peace.
troy

[Zorak]

If you are still having problems getting a CD of the program, a free full-working demo (full data and feature-set, just limited to the number of records you can input) is available for download at http://powerchurch.com/demo10.

[troy]

Thanks Zorak. I finally got it today. I'm looking forward to this. It should be fun!

God's Peace.
troy

[pbossman]

[quote="NeilZ"]

The main problem with that was you had to have a dedicated server to run this on, with a heck of a good firewall to insure that it wouldn't get hacked.

Many churches do not have the resources to setup that type of system. What I did at my last church was setup a GoToMyPC account that allowed authorized users access to a dedicated computer in the church network.

GoToMyPC utilizes a very secure system (Citrix) to create a virtual desktop on the user's machine. Its linked to the dedicate machine at church. This provided a way for people (Treasurer, Elders, Class Leaders) to access the machine from home.

The downside is that only one person could use it at a time, however, that was rarely an issue.[/quote]

My wife uses Citrix, so I'm familiar with it. I'll have to give it a try. I downloaded the demo, it didn't work on my laptop - it installed but wouldn't launch. Something about a file missing. It installed and works fine on an older PC. (Our church has the SW, but I am tinkering with alternate connectivity options).

I found the database files and can access them using SQL. Read only won't satisfy what we'd like to do.

I realize this would be a shift in business plan, but a hosted application would be nice. Powerchurch running a centralized server, database, and performing scheduled backups. Then have a monthly charge for use.

The problem we have is getting the data into the database. There's too few people doing it. It's much easier for a member of the church to go to a website and reserve a meeting room, schedule an event, rather than trying to train the congregation on remotely accessing power church. I'll give the remote access a try.

Thanks for the feedback. It's valuable for our committee discussions. BTW - I think with the amount of transactions people conduct on line, there's becoming a defacto expectation that this type of stuff can be done through a (secure) web interface - from wherever they happen to be.

[Zaphod]

FYI, I'm watching this thread very closely. I'm not at liberty to say why, or to what extent, but just know that I'm VERY interested in the thoughts that people are posting in this, and other similar threads.

Carry on.

[tborgal]

I think that pbossman's idea of a hosted application where you could use an online version of PC+ is very interesting. This would appear to solve a lot of problems I have seen over the past couple of weeks with people doing some very volatile things with working in more than one location and swapping backups between locations. Also could prove to be a new revenue stream for PowerChurch.

Just my nickels worth.

[troy]

It doesn't take any stretch of the imagination to see that a web interface to PowerChurch Plus is a boon to many users.

Dedicated servers are cheap as are cable internet connections for hosting at your church. The aforementioned "heck of a good firewall to insure that it wouldn't get hacked" is really only a problem if you don't know what you're doing. The real problem lies in application design. Way too many break-ins occur due to SQL injection and poor validation of input data. These happen right through the firewall.

My current day job is connecting a legacy home-grown insurance system to the Internet. Connecting PowerChurch Plus to the Internet is really not that much different. I have to figure out what expectations PC+ has w.r.t. locking files.

I spent a few hours playing with this over the weekend and made these notes to myself. I'd put these somewhere else, but I don't see anywhere else in the forum they belong. If you are familiar with Python, then this will make sense to you.

I'm writing this for my reference, but I thought you might want to
see it.

PC+ - PowerChurch Plus
VFP - Visual FoxPro
ODBC - Open Database Connectivity

PC+ uses the VFP database, in free tables format (DBF, not DBC.)
Microsoft offers the ODBC driver for VFP for download [1]_.
Microsoft also has minimal documentation available for this
configuration [2]_.

You must configure a System DSN from Control Panel -> Administrative
Tools -> Data Sources (ODBC). You need to know the name you give
your DSN, as it will be used to access the database from ODBC. By
default, the user data tables are in C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data/.

With the `Python for Windows extensions`_, we can access the tables
from Python. You may need mfc71.dll_ for PythonWin. Here is an
example query from the EVEVENTS.DBF table::

PythonWin 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Apr 18 2007, 08:51:08) [MSC v.1310 32
bit (Intel)] on win32.
Portions Copyright 1994-2006 Mark Hammond - see 'Help/About
PythonWin' for further copyright information.
>>> import odbc
>>> dir(odbc)
['SQLDataSources', 'SQL_FETCH_ABSOLUTE', 'SQL_FETCH_FIRST',
'SQL_FETCH_FIRST_SYSTEM', 'SQL_FETCH_FIRST_USER',
'SQL_FETCH_LAST', 'SQL_FETCH_NEXT', 'SQL_FETCH_PRIOR',
'SQL_FETCH_RELATIVE', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', 'error',
'odbc']
>>> odbc.SQLDataSources(odbc.SQL_FETCH_FIRST_SYSTEM)
('PowerChurch Plus', 'Microsoft Visual FoxPro Driver')
>>> db = odbc.odbc('PowerChurch Plus')
>>> dir(db)
['close', 'commit', 'cursor', 'rollback', 'setautocommit']
>>> c = db.cursor()
>>> import glob
>>> glob.glob("C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data/EV*.DBF")
['C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVCODES.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVDEFTASK.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVEQLINK.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVEVENTS.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVINFO.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVOCC.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVROOMLAYOUT.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVROOMLINK.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVROOMS.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVSKLINK.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVTASKLINK.DBF',
'C:/PowerChurch/PCPLUS10/data\\EVTASKS.DBF']
>>> c.execute("SELECT * FROM EVEVENTS;")
0
>>> c.fetchall()
[(1, 'Work Day ', 'Everyone will meet at the
church to help clean it up in preparation for moving in!', ' ',
1, '', 1, '', 1, <DbiDate object at 0x009662E0>, <DbiDate object
at 0x009662B0>, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 2L, 1L)]
>>>

As you can see using Python to access data is a snap. Creating a
data server using some XML format should not be hard.

My biggest concern is file-locking. I don't know if we'll be able
to access files with PC+ and Python simultaneously. I expect not.
We'll have to work around that, perhaps by making a copy of the file
before we open it in Python.

.. _[1]: msdn2.microsoft. com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb190233.aspx
.. _[2]: msdn2.microsoft. com/en-us/library/ms710251.aspx
.. _Python for Windows extensions:
sourceforge. net/projects/pywin32
.. _mfc71.dll: w ww.python. net/crew/mhammond/downloads/mfc71.dll

* Links broken intentionally because I don't have 10 posts and must be a spammer. :)

[pbossman]

I want to give a background for where I'm coming from.
Our church has a task force to analyze what data different groups within the church have a need for, what data is being collected, etc. Then we're going to see what we can do to deliver a solution which allows committees, programs, members, etc the ability to maintain (their) information and access the information that they need (and are allowed to have). I joined the taskforce because I work in the data management field on enterprise relational databases.

I know nothing about church management but lot's about managing data. So I started by downloading the demo, examining what the software does, how the software allows us to do what we want to do, and what limitations would prevent it's wider use.

I don't want to have to train lot's of users on power church. If someone wants to reserve a room, I'd want them to go to a web page to see if the room was available (what rooms are available), then reserve it. Anyway, we're still interviewing our users to determine all the requirements. I expect we're already under-utilizing power church.

I'm dialing down my involvement short term (we had a baby), but I'll both monitor the thread and as I know more about what we want to (and can't easily) do, I'll provide my more refined requirements.

[mikesg]

I check the forums from time to time just to see if this type of thing is in development. A hosted solution using xSQL/PHP back end would be great! So here's a big "me too".

I know many churches don't have the resources for such hosting, but I don't think that is a real issue. One project that I was involved with recently used as an option SQL-lite. It's a self contained database engine. We also supported MySQL, PostgreSQL and MSSQL as options too. I wasn't a dev, but the people who were didn't look at supporting more than one SQL as being any significant problem.

As for the firewall, again, you should already have one. If you're allowing remote access to your DB/Network/anything, then you should have someone who knows what they are doing to help set it up securely for you anyway. If you don't allow this, then the firewall isn't an issue, but there are still benefits to be had internally. Zero configuration for the clients would be one if we're talking about accessing it from a browser.

Personally I would love to see this running in Apache/MySQL/PHP. Many good ideas come to mind..

[tborgal]

Take a look at this thread. This may really interest some of you.

http://www.powerchurch.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2737

[tfarrell]

When I first heard about Powerchurch (I'll be honest) I was disappointed that it was tied to VFP. This leads me to the decision about where to keep the church calendar, in our groupware system (Zimbra) or in PC+ and import it.

Frankly, I could use PC+ most efficiently if it could export the calendar data to an ical file. That way I could mix different groups of calendars.

We have small groups at our church and I would like for the sg leaders to have a calendar for their group and be able to update it remotely.

In the above scenario, the PC+ calendar would only be used for whole-church events. Perhaps that's not what you guys are going for, but that's what I'm working towards. Maybe I'll take Troy's concept and make an ical-writer.

[NeilZ]

When I first heard about Powerchurch (I'll be honest) I was disappointed that it was tied to VFP.

Just wondering why ?? Visual FoxPro is a very robust database engine. Granted, its not DB2 or SQL Server, but the costs of running it on one of those runtimes would roughly double the cost of the program.

[tfarrell]

It's not the robustness, but the portability. Let me sum up my bias, I "dislike" (funny how the content filter works here) lock-in. For this reason I try to stay away from MS where I can.

I'm not a Linux-zealot, I just like to keep my options open but that often times means MS is not an option.

The reason I don't like lock-in is because big software companies are like dr*g dealers...the first hit is alway free (or cheap). But then they get you hooked.

So anyway, thats my bias.

I'm not sure I understand why using a different database would double the cost. Licensing? Perhaps PC+ could use a database that doesn't require licensing. PostgreSQL for one example. I don't know the inner workings but PgSQL has an ODBC driver and runs on more platforms than I've seen in the flesh.

But perhaps I'm speaking in ignorance about the whole thing. After all, I've never personally developed in foxpro.