I just finished updating the Sheepology demo with the latest code. New features include:

• fully function visual group tree editor
• email

The visual editor turned out to be a very good exercise in learning Flex. The editor is now fully functional. You can drag and drop groups onto each other to create parent/child relationships. Click on a connection to delete it. Click on the X in the upper right to delete a group. There is a button for creating new groups and a way to get back to the list view. Positioning is persistent. Changes made are immediately saved to the database. It is fully interactive.

After some thought, I concluded that this might be a useful tool for managing pages in a content management system as well and I may generalize it at some future point for that purpose.

The email system is rudimentary. You can send email to one or more individuals or to a group or a group and its subgroups. It uses TinyMCE for rich-text editing. It stores a history of any email sent. And automatically BCC’s the sender. I made a short detour from the visual group editor to make this happen because I thought it would be a necessity for any church wanting to use Sheepology in production.

The next thing I will be working on is some sort of reporting system as I think that will be critical. Other items on my list of future features are:

• inventory system
• a more sophisticated contact management system
• accounting
• integrated web content management
• on-line donations
• volunteer scheduling

I’m willing to takes suggestions at this point on what people would find most useful or necessary.