Prayer Center Extension
February 16, 2009 - 7:40pm
Sounds interesting...
Sound interesting ... I did some quick research into SMS gateways (in the US, I assume...), and it looks like it would be quite easy to rig up.
If you don't mind having adverts included in the last 40 characters of the SMS, you can get unlimited SMSes sent / received by your website for free:
http://zeepmobile.com/developers/
... or if don't mind paying a small charge for ad-free messages, there is a lot of choice. Clickatell.com, one of the biggest bulk SMS gateway providers, offers 1000 SMS message credits for about 40 USD (you can pay for and send a maximum of 5000 messages / month before you also have to pay for a special provider 'shortcode'). The use of their API and platform is otherwise free.
Both of these services (and many others, I'm sure) offer well documented APIs and code libraries, so I think the coding effort would not be too hard. Note that it would also be possible to get incoming prayer requests sent by SMS, so the website receives the request via the SMS gateway and then sends out emails / SMSes as required...
If you don't need this built instantly (i.e. before the end of Feb), I can probably offer to help you out.
Alan
February 16, 2009 - 7:47pm
Church site link... :)
Never thought to let you see "my" church site as it is currently although I'm still in the process of playing about with multiple Mods/Coms etc to try and put on yet more useful utilities. We've had the Prayer Centre running nicely but unfortunately with the upgrade to 1.5, I lost all the previous prayers, or at least, still have them on the old database, but couldn't be bothered trying to figure out how to pull them in manually to MyPHP Admin etc. Your idea of a text option is a superb one indeed and would be really useful if it could be pulled off.
February 17, 2009 - 12:46pm
After further thought it
After further thought it seems that a solution like this might not be the best. There are a couple of SMS extensions on the Joomla.org site but none that I could get running on J1.5. From what these extensions claim they would be able to do they may be better at handling what I was referring to. Just have to wait to see if they can get a SMS extension out works in 1.5
Thanks for the research Alan although I don't have to have anything built right now. I am currently working with 2 churches on setting up their sites in Joomla but neither have committed. We'll see what the future holds.
I love the Prayer Center extension though. It is clean, simple, and WORKS out of the box. Can't beat anything that is free and works. A must have for a church or ministry.
Chris
March 17, 2009 - 1:42pm
I love this extension
Greetings Joomla-ites
I love the prayer center extension. I am an avid Joomla Junkie for God and found this extension for our site http://www.ncc-helpinghands.org
I look to be more active here on this forum.
Peace and God's Love
Landon
I have been playing around with the Prayer Center extension for a couple of weeks now. Seems to be quite a nice extension I must say. I would like to see the ability to send out text messages from this extension as well as e-mails. Don't know much about how that works but from talking to some others that would be extrememly powerful considering everyone today has a cell phone.
Someone submits a prayer request and then all of the sudden regardless of where your congregation is they get a text to pray for someone in need. Powerful!!!!
Any thoughts? Is this possible. Who can I pay to have this feature added?
Chris