Tracking kids at church (VBS/nursery/sunday school)
February 25, 2008 - 8:21am
Worth A Solution
This is a definite problem for churches. The top church management systems have this capability built in. It would be great for there to be a good open source solution for people.
You may, also, want to post about this over at http://groups.drupal.org/churches. See if anyone there is interested in pitching in.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
March 12, 2008 - 7:47pm
Sounds like a great idea
It might not hurt to collect a "key word" that would allow the parent to give a key word to someone else to come pick the kid up. I don't know how common it is, but worth considering.
Also, I know a lot of parents are pretty particular about pictures of their kids rolling around the Internet.
The food allergy idea is great. Would it have a "classroom allergy report"? I think that would be needed to be as useful as possible. Depending on how you handled registration and the organization of kids, this should be easily enough handled.
I hear there is a cool new capability with Drupal called distributions or some such. Anyway, you could distribute your solution in one canned package to make it even easier for churches to release.
When my wife came home and told me all of the problems she had helping with vacation Bible school, I saw a need and now I'd like to propose a solution. Using a computer with a webcam and a web browser, you could keep all of the kids' information organized and photographically verify that you were sending the right kid home with the right adult. (I know churches are careful about releasing kids these days.) Some of my wife's problems involved not being able to put names to the faces of all of the visiting children and not having access the the food allergy information that had been collected, but a well designed Drupal site could solve those problems too.
I'm working on a solution using CCK, views, and workflow and I would love to hear people's input. Would this be practical to use? Would it be useful or just another solution in search of a problem? How would you suggest I approach this problem using Drupal? If I'm barking up the wrong tree, let me know before I pull another all-nighter. If you think it's great, let me know that too.
Also, this is not meant to be a one man show or just and in house solution. If you would like to see my work or offer to help, let me know. If I'm on the right track, here are some things I could use some help with: