Private Demos Now Available

We can now host private demo installations to facilitate your evaluation process.  These demo installations are created in randomly named directories.  The purpose of these private demos is to give you a chance to experiment in your own space.  You can enter a little data, show your minister and your treasurer how it works, without having to worry about someone changing the admin password or deleting half the menu options.  Your demo space will be private but not particularly secure or permanent.  Please don't put a lot of work into it as it will be deleted in about a week unless you ask for more time.  Assuming your evaluation goes well please plan to download and install in your own world as soon as possible.

Please don't put nonsense for contact information.  Your contact information will only be used to communicate about ChurchInfo and will not be shared or sold for any other purpose.  If you put nonsense in the Private Demo Form your demo will probably be recycled soon and you will get Error 404 page not found while trying to use your private demo.

To get started with your private demo use this link: Private Demo Form

To our international users

You can set the language by changing sLanguage in Admin->Edit General Settings.  ChurchInfo currently supports the following settings: de_DE (German), en_AU (Australian English), fr_FR (French, not updated recently), it_IT (Italian, not updated recently), nl_NL (Dutch), pt_BR (Brazilian Portuguese), sv_SE (Swedish).  If you would like to develop a new translation please let me know!

Simple Installation on Windows

I often get request from people who want to quickly install ChurchInfo on a computer running Windows.  This is a great way to get started and experiment, although the real power of ChurchInfo is best appreciated when it is running on a server and accessed from multiple different computers.  I use this procedure to install ChurchInfo for experimenting or development on a Windows laptop.

I have had good luck hopping back and forth between this stand-alone installation as a real server, simply using phpMyAdmin to back up and restore the database.

Here are the step-by-step instructions:

Install xampp for Windows.  This provides Apache, PHP and MySQL.  I tell it to run Apache and MySQL as services.  There are some compatibility issues with the latest smoking-hot versions of MySQL and PHP, so I recommend using this nicely matured version of xampp:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/files/XAMPP%20Windows/1.6.7/

Unpack the churchinfo directory from the distribution into the directory C:\xampp\htdocs\churchinfo
Use Firefox to browse to: http://localhost
Click the phpMyAdmin link
Under "Create new database" type "churchinfo" and press Create
Select the Import tab
Press Browse...
Navigate to C:\xampp\htdocs\churchinfo\SQL\Install.sql and choose this file
Press the Go button
Select the Privileges tab
Press Add a new user
Set User name to "churchinfo", Host to "localhost", Password to "churchinfo", Re-type to "churchinfo", the press Go (bottom-right)
Now browse to: http://localhost/churchinfo
Log in with user name "admin", password "churchinfoadmin"
It will ask you to change the password immediately.

Try our Demo

We have a demo installation of the latest version 1.2.12 available here

Feel free to play with this database to see if ChurchInfo will work for your church. The passwords for this demo database are: “demoadmin” for Admin, “seemoney” for JohnFinancial, and “nomoney” for SuzieNotFinancial.  This new version  connects to the Google geocoder, which has better  international support than  the previous geocoder.  There are many bug fixes and minor enhancements.  See the links below if you find a bug or want to discuss an issue.

The demo sites includes a simple connection to schedule group meetings in WebCalendar, available here: http://www.churchdb.org/WebCalendar-1.2.b1.