Sheepology Sprint

My employer, 5Q Communications, is very generous.  Normally we get to use 1 hour out of our regular work time for learning something of our choice that will benefit the company. This quarter all full-time employees were given 8 hours of extra learning time as a reward for meeting our company-wide goal for milestones.

I have chosen and been approved to use my 8 hours in one lump to work on adding some new features to my open-source project Sheepology. Since the goal here is to learn something, I plan to add features using technologies I haven’t used and don’t know yet.

Since this is a sprint I’ll create a list of things I want to do that is longer than what I have time for and work through the list till I run out of time. I want to have my projects planned well in advance so I won’t waste my 8rs. I also need to import some membership data before the sprint.  On my list are the following.

• Donations using Google Checkout, Paypal, or similar
• Integration with Google Apps including things like single-sign-on, contact synchronization, menu integration, etc.
• Integration with Facebook using Facebook Connect or something similar
• producing printable reports using something like Geraldo Reports
• inter-parish/diocesan communication via AMQP (see qpid or rabbitmq)

That should be quite a bit more than I can do in 8rs.

Sheepology Finally in Production

Sheepology is finally in production. You can see it at Saint Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church.

Sheepology started as a church management system, but its first purpose in this rollout is as a content management system. Over the coming weeks I will be importing membership data and beginning to use the church management aspects of it. Other content based features will also be built as we find we need them.

I am also considering renaming the project to something a little less cutesy.

Other things that need to be done before I call it beta quality are documentation and improved installation procedures.

Family Blog

You can follow our family blog at Genesis 12:1… the escapades of an Orthodox Christian homeschooling family living in South West Florida.