Open Source Catholic

A new chapter for Open Source Catholic: announcing the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:31:00 +0000

After years of conversations, drafts, and quiet collaboration behind the scenes, I’m glad to be able to share some news with this community: the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation has been formally incorporated, and Open Source Catholic is entering a new chapter alongside it. What follows is the story of how we got here — where we started, the people who made it possible, what the new foundation is (and isn’t), and an invitation for those of you who have been reading along to take the next step with us.

Where we started

Open Source Catholic was launched back in 2009 by Jeff Geerling, in the wake of the Catholic New Media Convention, with a simple but ambitious premise: that Catholics working in software could share their projects, their struggles, and their reasoning out in the open, for the good of the Church. Open Source Catholic has been a small but steady witness to that idea ever since, a place where a parish webmaster, a full-time developer, and a priest who codes on the side could meet on equal ground.

A few years ago I joined this community to share some of the work I had been doing: the BibleGet API and its family of plugins for word processors and websites, the Liturgical Calendar API that computes the universal and particular calendars of the Roman Rite, and the Semina Verbi wiki that tries to gather the traces of the Gospel across human culture. None of these are finished projects. They are all, in different ways, works of patience. What has kept them moving forward, more than anything else, is that there is a community around them.

The Catholic Devs slack

Out of the same impulse, a few of us helped launch the Catholic Devs slack workspace, a space where developers from around the world could have the back-and-forth conversations that a blog or a mailing list can’t quite support. It has grown steadily, and today it is a place where questions about liturgical data, missal typography, parish platforms, Bible APIs, and a dozen other problems get asked and answered every week. If you haven’t joined yet, you can request an invite either from the CDCF community page or from the “Get My Invite” button on our own chat page — come say hello.

What has always struck me about this slack and about the broader Open Source Catholic community is how many people are doing serious, high-quality work, often on their own time, with very little structural support. Projects survive on the goodwill of individuals. Knowledge is passed informally. When someone steps back, things can quietly fall apart. This is a long-standing problem in open source generally, and it is even more acute in a niche like ours.

How we got here

The idea of a foundation had been on my mind for some years, shaped by watching how the Apache Software Foundation, the Document Foundation, the Linux Foundation, and the WordPress project have each given durable structure to volunteer communities that would otherwise have dispersed — and by the wish to see the same pattern applied, in our own particular way, to technology in service of the Church’s evangelizing mission. A meeting with Fr. Charbel Bteich gave the idea fresh impetus, and I began drafting a proposal for a Vatican foundation, reviewed along the way by Giovanni Silvestri at the IT Office of the Italian Bishops Conference, and eventually sent to Pope Francis.

Going from idea to reality, though, takes people. On May 8, 2025 I stood in Saint Peter’s Square with Tim Connors to witness the election of Pope Leo XIV, and it was out of that encounter that Tim put me in touch with Fr. Josh McCarty, Taylor Black, Andrew DeBerry, and others who were already hard at work building up a community of Catholic developers. That the new pontiff was an American, with a mathematician’s training and an expressed desire to continue Pope Leo XIII’s work of confirming the Church’s social teaching — now in the digital era — felt like a further confirmation of the timeliness of what we were setting out to do. Taylor and I very quickly discovered that we were circling the same conviction, and a small team began meeting to sketch what a Catholic open source foundation might look like. Jeff Geerling and Mike Kasberg from Open Source Catholic joined some of those conversations, as did Matthew Sanders, CEO of Longbeard and the originator of the Builders AI Forum (BAIF), and Andrew DeBerry, who would go on to join the initial board.

In November 2025, Taylor and I brought the idea to the BAIF at the Gregorian University, and the enthusiasm of the participants there was enough to convince us that it was time to move from conversation to incorporation. JM Boyd put us in touch with Daniel Hennessy, a Catholic lawyer in Texas, who handled the legal filing.

A next step: the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation

On January 21, 2026, the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation (CDCF) was formally established as a nonprofit corporation with the Texas Secretary of State. The CDCF is not a replacement for Open Source Catholic, and it is not a takeover of anyone’s project. It is an attempt to give structure and continuity to the kind of work this community has been doing informally for years. It provides a legal home, a governance framework, peer review, and the kind of institutional scaffolding that lets open source projects outlive the enthusiasm of their original authors. A certificate of formation may sound dry, but in practice it is the difference between a project that depends on one person’s calendar and a project that can accept donations, sign agreements, welcome contributors under a clear license, and still be there in ten years.

There is another role, though, that I think the CDCF is uniquely positioned to play — one that Open Source Catholic on its own has never quite been able to take on — and that is the role of a bridge between Catholic developers and the Church’s own institutions and hierarchy. Too often, worthy projects have quietly stalled not because the work was poor but because of a simple lack of communication and mutual understanding between developers of good will and the Church offices that carry the responsibility of governing Catholic data. A foundation with a clear governance structure, a recognizable legal identity, and a manifesto rooted in the Church’s own tradition is something a diocesan office or an episcopal conference can actually talk to. Together, in the spirit of a synodal Church, we can be attentive to the real potential the digital realm holds for the Church’s evangelizing mission, while also discerning and safeguarding against the risks that technology can pose — defending always the value and the dignity of the human person, and encouraging solidarity and subsidiarity among local Catholic communities.

If you read the CDCF manifesto, the continuity with what Open Source Catholic has always stood for is immediate. Technology in the service of the human person, made in the image of God. Open, inspectable, accountable systems. A preference for tools that can be shared over tools that can be sold. A memory of the Church’s long tradition of preserving and translating knowledge — the scriptoria, the universities, the catechisms — and an awareness that the same work has to be done today, in the language of code and protocols and APIs.

Shared ideals

The ideals that the CDCF articulates are the same ones that I have seen written, in one form or another, in countless threads in this community over the years:

That Catholic software should be open by default, so that parishes, dioceses, and developers anywhere in the world can use, inspect, and adapt it without asking permission or paying rent.
That the person is the subject, not the data — systems should serve the human being, not the other way around.
That transparency, accountability, and inclusion are not just contemporary buzzwords but specifications of what it means to build things in a Christian way.
That knowledge belongs to the community, and that building in the commons is a practical expression of the early Church’s intuition that believers held things in common.

The value of the CDCF, as I see it, is that it takes these shared ideals and gives them a place to live beyond any one of us.

An appeal to Catholic developers

If you have been reading along in this community for years without ever opening an issue or a pull request, this is the moment. If you have a project sitting in a personal repo that you have always thought could be useful to someone else, this is the moment. If you are a student learning to code and wondering how your faith has anything to do with it, this is the moment.

Come and join the Catholic Devs slack — either through the CDCF community page or via the Open Source Catholic chat page. Look at the projects the CDCF is already hosting and at the governance documents that describe how new projects can be vetted and adopted. Bring your own work. Bring your questions. Bring your particular expertise, whether you write Rust, translate between languages, design interfaces, or simply know where the documentation is weakest.

And if you have — or know of — a Catholic software project that deserves to be seen, please submit it to the Community Projects page. One of the things the CDCF can do, that individual contributors working in isolation cannot, is pool resources and give visibility to the quiet, faithful work that so many Catholic developers are already doing around the world. The more of that work we can gather in one place, the easier it becomes for the next person to find it, build on it, and contribute back.

Open Source Catholic has always been, at its best, a gathering of people who believed that the Gospel and good software are not strangers to each other. The Catholic Digital Commons Foundation is the next step in making that conviction durable. The invitation is open.

The Tale of the Episode Numbers Bug

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 19:30:00 +0000

One of the ways I put my talents as a software developer to use for the church is I maintain the Catholic Stuff You Should Know website. I love reading stories about interesting bugs other developers have encountered, so I thought I’d share my own story about a bug I recently fixed on catholicstuffpodcast.com.

To understand the bug, it will be helpful to have a little bit of the backstory. The Catholic Stuff You Should Know website was originally built with WordPress. In 2016, I migrated the website off of WordPress and onto Jekyll (which is what the site still uses today). As part of that migration, I added episode numbers to all of our existing episodes to help keep things organized.

I even still have the simple PHP script I used to pull these episode numbers out of the audio filenames (which already had them) and add them to the Jekyll frontmatter for the episode so we could show the episode numbers on the website. It’s a little bit hacky, but it got the job done.

<?php
$postFiles = scandir("./_posts");

foreach($postFiles as $file) {
    if ($file == "." || $file == "..") { continue; }

    $contents = file_get_contents("./_posts/".$file);
    preg_match("/audio: '(\d{1,3})-/", $contents, $matches);
    $number = $matches[1];

    print $number . "\n";

    $contents = str_replace("\ntitle:", "\nnumber: $number\ntitle:", $contents);

    file_put_contents("./_posts/".$file, $contents);
}

Recently, one of our listeners notified us that the episode numbers for some of our episodes from summer 2010 appeared to be incorrect. I took a peek, and sure enough, the listener was right!

I looked around a little more and compiled this list of our first 24 episodes, as they appeared on our website.

Jan 2010 · #1 Stylites
Jan 2010 · #2 Indulgences
Jan 2010 · #3 Prayer, Contemplation, and Liturgy
Jan 2010 · #4 Tetragrammaton
Jan 2010 · #5 Le Grande Chartreuse
Jan 2010 · #6 Eutrapelia and The Risus Paschalis
Feb 2010 · #7 Who Punched Arius?
Feb 2010 · #008 Cecchina Cabrini
Feb 2010 · #009 Ash Wednesday
Feb 2010 · #8 Ethiopian Christianity
Mar 2010 · #9 Campion's Brag
Mar 2010 · #10 Gregorian Chant
Apr 2010 · #11 Tenebrae
Apr 2010 · #12 The Holy Sepulcher
Apr 2010 · #13 Bona Coniugali
Apr 2010 · #14 How to Make a Priest
May 2010 · #15 Skellig Michael
Jun 2010 · #019 Abstinence
Jun 2010 · #018 Schisms
Jun 2010 · #16 Quiz Show
Sep 2010 · #17 Eros and Agape
Sep 2010 · #18 New Translation of the Mass
Sep 2010 · #19 When Bad Popes Go Good
Oct 2010 · #20 Peter's Bones

If you can correctly identify the bug from that list, well done! And if you can’t… Neither could I, initially. I was perplexed – there’s nothing complicated about the way our episode numbers work. We simply pull them from the YAML frontmatter for the jekyll blog post. From this initial list I had compiled, it looked like whatever was assigning episode numbers had somehow ignored a few episodes in the numbering.

Because this is a Jekyll site, each “episode” is just a “post”, which is just a markdown file in a folder in the repository. I broke out some Unix tools to try to pin down the problem. As I write this, the most recent episode on our website is #471. And that matches the number of files in our _posts directory.

$ ls _posts/*.md | wc -l
471

Well, it’s good news that our total number of episodes matches the current episode number. But what the heck is going on then? Knowing that our frontmatter uses a number: key for episode numbers, I tried this:

$ cat _posts/*.md | grep "number:" | cut -f 2 -d ' ' | sort -n
001
002
003
...
469
470
471

At a glance, that list looks correct. Let’s look at all frontmatter “source” for all the numbers for all episodes from 2010.

$ grep "number:" _posts/2010-*
_posts/2010-01-06-stylites.md:number: 001
_posts/2010-01-12-indulgences.md:number: 002
_posts/2010-01-15-prayer-contemplation-and-liturgy.md:number: 003
_posts/2010-01-20-tetragrammaton.md:number: 004
_posts/2010-01-25-le-grande-chartreuse.md:number: 005
_posts/2010-01-28-eutrapelia-and-the-risus-paschalis.md:number: 006
_posts/2010-02-03-who-punched-arius.md:number: 007
_posts/2010-02-09-cecchina-cabrini.md:number: 008
_posts/2010-02-18-ash-wednesday.md:number: 009
_posts/2010-02-25-ethiopian-christianity.md:number: 010
...

Everything’s apparently correct!

Still confused, I started looking at a specific post in more detail. I started with February 2010, the first month where broken posts show up. And I noticed that the “Ethiopian Christianity” episode was showing number 8 on the site but the frontmatter was number 10:

title: 'Ethiopian Christianity'
number: 010

Can you spot the bug? Our episode numbers were padded with zeros - a common practice that makes them sort correctly in filenames. (Remember, I initially pulled these episode numbers from our audio filenames.) But in this case, Ruby’s YAML parser was interpreting the number as an octal number because of the leading 0!

irb> require 'yaml'
irb> YAML.load("---\nnumber: 010")
=> {"number"=>8}

Fortunately for us, this ceases to be a problem after episode 100 (when we no longer have any leading zeros). So our most recent 371 episodes are numbered correctly. But some episodes between 1 and 100 have incorrect numbering. In fact, most do. All numbers between 7 and 100 that are valid octal numbers will be incorrect because only numbers 1-7 have the same representation in octal and base 10. Some numbers, like 009, don’t parse correctly as an octal number. I think, in this case, the YAML parser falls back to a string, which is why the leading zeros showed up on the web for these numbers.

Although the problem was hard to identify, The fix is easy – we just need to remove the leading zeros from our YAML!

sed -i 's/number: [0]*\([1-9]*\)/number: \1/' _posts/*.md

So that’s how we found and fixed an episode numbering but for the Catholic Stuff You Should Know website. I hope you enjoyed the story. This wasn’t the first bug I’ve seen related to parsing octals, and it probably won’t be the last! So it’s good to remember this can happen any time you see a leading zero on a number - particularly number literals in YAML or code. And despite this small bug, working with Jekyll for the last 4 years has been a pleasure overall.

Catholic Stuff You Should Know is a weekly podcast that explores Catholic topics. Learn more at catholicstuffpodcast.com.

Semina Verbi: an online encylopedia of the influence of the Gospel on human culture

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 13:56:00 +0000

Open knowledge

Reading up on some of the past posts in this community, I see there have been a number of posts about open access to information, in particular (in this context) as regards the Catholic faith. Access to the biblical texts, access to the Catechism and magisterial documents… When a project is open source, it has a good possibility of surviving over time if it is able to create a community, because it remains accessible to the community even when the original people behind the project might not be able to continue developing the project.

Bringing knowledge to the masses was and is the big hope of Wikipedia, which has become a cultural phenomenon in it’s own right. “Jimbo” Wales and others with him made a big wager when they started the wikipedia project: they trusted the community in making knowledge available to the community. This model has a number of drawbacks, because it is easy for a lot of personal opinion rather than true scientific knowledge to be disseminated through such a platform. And thus the need for an organized community, with internal politics, so as to handle abuse of the platform. And yet, with all the limits and drawbacks of this open model and community effort, the project has come quite a ways, and you can effectively find a lot of useful information which is readily indexed by search engines. Nowadays, almost any question you might have, if you type it into a search engine, you are almost guaranteed to get some result from wikipedia.

Seeing how it is something we do have to take into account, becoming a tool that people are starting to use in their daily lives, even though the quality of the contents cannot always be guaranteed, and seeing that the software that this platform is built on (MediaWiki) is also Open Source software released to the community so as to be able to make other similar wiki style encyclopedias, I’ve been thinking over the past decade or so that it would be useful, as Catholics, to not only contribute to Wikipedia in a scientific manner so as to contribute to the quality level of the contents, but also to use these same platforms to build open knowledge encyclopedias about christianity.

There are some very useful treasure troves of information out there already using this line of reasoning, such as Cathopedia, which has lots of information about theological topics and about church history and about the Catholic church today. Quite a praiseworthy initiative, with a lot of potential, which can still use a lot of community contribution to make it the useful tool that it aspires to be.

But other than an encyclopedia about Catholicism in general, over the past few years I’ve had in mind a project that would bring to light the way in which the Gospel (and the Word of God in general) has influenced human culture, human creativity and expression in the arts. More of a cultural project than a theological project, and yet a Catholic project nonetheless. This dialogue between faith and human expression is present in Saint Paul when he preaches in the Areopagus of Athens, it was the great effort of Saint Justin who coined the term “Seeds of the Word” in trying to translate the Gospel message into the language of greek philosophy thus creating the foundations of Catholic philosophy. Saint Justin considered those elements of truth found in human culture to be a “seed of the Word”, planted by God as Creator in human culture even if those humans didn’t know God or His Word. The approach of Saint Justin is that of a very positive approach to human culture and expression, and was a big encouragement in expressing the message of the Gospel through the means of human culture and expression.

Seeds of the Word

Over the centuries, how much artwork, music, philosophy, literature has been inspired by the message of the Gospel. And other than direct inspiration, we can still think in the same terms as Saint Justin, of those expressions of humanity that even without knowing God or having any intent of evangelizing, may yet contain seeds of truth that are reflections of the Gospel message. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to bring all of this to light, in a wiki style encylopedia?

Once you start digging, there’s a whole universe of information out there along these lines. And yet, it would be very useful to bring it to light, to help people see that christianity is not just some niche in society, and christians are not a minority of people who should be ashamed of who they are and what they think. Christianity, or more specifically the message of the Gospel, helps society to become more human and humane! It brings out the best of beauty that mankind has to offer.

I don’t want to get lost in too many words now, I’ll get right to the point: I have set out to undertake such a project, and after experimenting a few times with the MediaWiki platform in the past few years, I believe I have finally succeeded in running a stable instance. So the Semina Verbi wiki is born and is open to community collaboration, in an orderly fashion. In an orderly fashion means that it is not open to the general public, so as to avoid spam and abuse. It is sufficient to request access, and if the necessary Catholic and scientific qualities of the person requesting access can be verified, community collaboration is more than welcome.

As a proof of concept of how I envision the project, I have started creating the following pages, which are obviously open to contributions by approved editors:

ENGLISH

ITALIAN

Anyone who is available to contribute, let me know, let’s build this community together!

Bringing the Word of God to the desktop and to websites

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 12:35:00 +0000

There are a number of projects out there that publish Bible texts online. You can look up Bible verses, and even compare between versions.

That’s great for just consulting a Bible verse. But what if you want to quote a Bible verse in a document, or on a website?

Most people would go to one of the websites where you can find an online version of the Bible, copy the verses they are interested in, and paste them into their document (or webpage). But then you probably have to reformat the text, and depending how long it is, it can become a cumbersome task. You might mistakenly delete or alter a word in the Bible quote. If you’re not careful about which website you’re consulting, you might not even be getting an authentic source of the Bible text. Maybe you don’t even know what version of the Bible you’re copying and pasting from, if you’re not careful and informed in Bible studies.

A few years ago, a priest in a parish I was in showed me a Macro for Microsoft Word, which could retrieve a Bible quote from BibleWorks, if BibleWorks was installed on the computer. That was a great little tool. However, it was not officially published anywhere, it was just some little tool someone had made and passed around. And BibleWorks is not free software, not everyone can afford to have this kind of software. And back at the time, there weren’t any Catholic versions of the Bible in BibleWorks. I tried contacting the developers at some point to ask why that would be the case, and they answered that they hadn’t been able to gain the rights for usage of the Catholic versions of the Bible.

So I started developing the idea, why not make a tool that is a little bit more official. A tool that can be published, that people can download and use from official sources. And I thought, even though having Bible versions locally in order to work offline can guarantee usage in all cases, it is however a challenge to prevent the Bible texts from being fully copied and published without consent of the rightful copyright owners. And, it can be a challenge to protect the sources of the Bible texts from being modified or overwritten.

So I thought about the idea of creating an API, an endpoint which can be interrogated by an application, and receive in response the text of the Bible verse or verses from the desired version or versions of the Bible. APIs are becoming a thing today, so it seemed fit to develop using modern technologies. And producing data from an endpoint in a format such as XML or better yet JSON can guarantee the possibility of consuming the data from any application.

So I set out creating the BibleGet endpoint which can now be found at https://query.bibleget.io . The website that presents the project can be found at https://www.bibleget.io .

And I set out to create a few plugins, to demonstrate in practice the consumption of the endpoint by an application. With patience and constance and a little bit of help from some friends for a heads up here and there, I was able to produce the following plugins:

BibleGet plugin for OpenOffice
BibleGet plugin for LibreOffice
BibleGet plugin for Microsoft Word
BibleGet plugin for Google Docs
BibleGet plugin for WordPress

Having recently started a MediaWiki installation (https://seminaverbi.bibleget.io), I have started somewhat of an integration into the mediawiki software, however it’s just a first attempt. Even though it’s in a working state, more progress is required to turn it into a stable and installable extension.

I believe these are all in a functioning state. I have received a few positive feedbacks, I’ve fixed a couple bugs which prevented one plugin or another from working on one system or another. Unfortunately many people will download and maybe even use the plugins without giving any feedback, so a little bit of a sense of uncertainty is always there… I would be glad if anyone in the OpenSourceCatholic community could try out the plugins and give their feedback!

Of course the API endpoint and the plugins are also a work in progress, and it can be a lot of work seeing that programming is not my main occupation. Being a Catholic priest, I have other duties. However programming is a passion, I enjoy doing it, I enjoy problem solving and it can be satisfying to see the result and to receive encouragement from people who find these tools useful. Perhaps in a next post I can outline some of the problems I am currently trying to solve, in order to enhance some of these projects.

Migration to Jekyll and GitHub Pages from Drupal site

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 03:44:58 +0000

After almost eight years with Open Source Catholic as a Drupal 7 website hosted on infrastructure generously provided by Midwestern Mac, I migrated all the Drupal site content into a static Jekyll-powered site hosted on GitHub Pages (thanks to a suggestion from Michael Bianco).

To maintain consistency we migrated everything, including comments and forum topics (we’re now using Disqus for commenting), and made sure all the old link paths were redirected to the new Jekyll structure.

Please let us know if you find any problems on this new version of the site by adding an issue to the Open Source Catholic website repository on GitHub.

Open Source Catholic - moving towards a more open site

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I just wanted to post an update at the end of 2015; as stated in The Future of Open Source Catholic, I wanted to find a way to move this site forward, being honest that I probably won’t have a lot of time to do much myself.

My main goals in doing so are to ensure Catholic developers and companies who are interested in OSS and an ‘open’ philosophy in their technological development have a central resource to learn and share ideas and software.

Some of the earliest suggestions have always been to make everything a blog post, and to that end, I’m going to work on a migration from the current site (which is built on Drupal 7 and integrates with Apache Solr search) to a static Jekyll site hosted on GitHub pages.

I’ve already set up the Open Source Catholic organization on GitHub, inside which the new site content will reside (in a public/open repository, which anyone can fork and contribute to), and I hope that with a little time and some assistance, we can get everything, including hopefully all the helpful comments and forum posts, migrated into a new static site.

Open source is 'only reliable way' to preserve human history, argues Vatican

Sat, 09 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

From The Inquirer:

"The main question at the start of our project was which format to save the texts. We needed to make sure [people] could still read the digital files in 50 years' time." Ammenti explained that, in order for the manuscripts to be readable, the Vatican Library opted for open source tools that do not require proprietary platforms, such as Microsoft Office, to be read.

Ammenti goes on to explain that the Vatican has chosen to use the FITS image format in order to preserve digitized scans of manuscripts and other works for decades, hopefully centuries, into the future.

See past post on OSC: Vatican Secret Archive is Digitizing to Open FITS Format.

5 Things Every Parish Website Should Have in 2015

Thu, 30 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Every year it’s important to assess your website to understand things that work and don’t work. With Easter season’s arrival, now is the perfect time to renew your website for some “spring cleaning.”

In this article, we will go over 5 things every parish website should have this year in 2015. We’ve prepared this as a checklist that includes a combination of website tools, content suggestions, and general functions. Before we begin, it’s important for you to treat this guide as a way to enhance a well-founded Catholic church website. If your parish has a website that looks like it’s from the 90’s, this guide won’t help as there’s no substitute for sub-par quality.

And so we begin!

1. Mass Times

Some people might find this obvious, but we’ve personally experienced and went through too many Catholic websites that fail to easily and accurately provide the #1 most sought-after information: mass times.

The bottom line is that the most popular reason someone visits a Catholic church website is to find out what time mass is provided at your parish. So why make that an obstacle for your website visitors? Having correct mass times and other service times listed visibly on the homepage can be one of the most effective thing you can do to improve the usability of your church website. Give the people what they want!

One good example of a parish website doing this right is the Church of the Good Shepherd in Los Angeles. When you arrive on their homepage, you can clearly find their mass times listed under the “Join Us This Weekend” box to the right, along with a link underneath to their full schedule of services. It’s a simple thing to feature on your church website that often gets overlooked.

2. Mobile-Friendly

Did you know that about 51% of the world’s population uses a mobile device? If half the people nowadays are checking websites from their phone or tablet, it’s a necessity to make your website mobile-friendly. In addition, this year Google announced they will incorporate mobile-friendliness into their algorithms. If you’re website isn’t mobile-friendly by April 21, chances are your website won’t even show up in the search results for someone using a mobile device. That leaves your parish website in the dust.

If you want to check if your website is mobile-friendly, click here to use a tool created by Google.

3. Image Gallery

Show some personality! With websites trending to be more visual and less wordy, maintaining an updated image gallery will significantly enhance the browsing experience. It also gives a nice inside look to the type of community involved at your church. This is important for building your parish “brand,” showing the great people of your congregation, and attaching a “face” to your mission.

A church is like a home, and anyone searching for a new home would want to see how it looks before buying. Having photos of the chapel, recreation centers, ministry leaders, youth activities, church-wide functions, and special events are just some of the many areas you can showcase for your parish.

Fortunately, it’s easy to install an image gallery into your website. There are tons of image gallery platforms that you can use to integrate into your website. With a platform like Instagram, it’s a dual benefit because it allows you to build an image gallery while also gaining the benefits of social media. If you have a website built on a CMS (Content Management System) such as Wordpress, it’s as easy as installing a plugin like “Instagram Feed.”

4. Easy Donations

Let’s face it, when it comes to asking for donations it’s often met with resistance, inconvenience, and neglect. But it’s a necessary aspect of our Catholic Church as we are built on people’s charity. So imagine trying to get someone to make a donation to your church using a complicated system that is neither intuitive nor user-friendly.

Having an easy-to-use donation platform will take away one less barrier from receiving donations. To recommend some tools, here are a few that we came across:

PayPal Donations: A well-known platform used by many churches around the world, PayPal has a trusting company image that won’t scare away your potential donors. It’s also very easy-to-use and donors don’t have to register for an account to send money.
Google Checkout: Through a program called Google Grant, nonprofits can use the Google Checkout system entirely for free since all fees are waived. Yup, that means you pay absolutely nothing to accept donations. The only drawback is that donors must be registered with a Google account to send money.
Network for Good: They offer a more robust platform specifically designed for nonprofits. You can create event pages, integrate different payment methods, organize online fundraisers, and even manage monthly recurring donations. With no set-up costs or monthly fees, they are also very affordable as you pay just the transaction price.

Social media has become a huge aspect of our lives today, especially if you own a mobile device. As the smartphone becomes better, social media becomes more accessible.

Good communication is key to building good relationships. When you have social media integrated into your website, it shows that your church is serious about expanding in the digital medium. More importantly, social media integration shows that you care about maintaining open dialogue with your parishioners outside the church every day of the week.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the most popular platforms used today. If you don’t have accounts created for your parish already, it’s time to get started now. Once you have your social media profiles setup, the most basic integration you can do is placing the profile links on your website. This will eventually lead your users to following your respective pages, and then joining the conversation. Social media can be used as an important part of online evangelization when used correctly. It has the power to reach an audience that we’ve never thought imaginable. Now that the future is here, we shouldn’t fall behind.

We understand that it can be difficult to make any improvements to your website with the lack of manpower—that’s why we’re here to help. If you need help getting any of the above-mentioned features onto your website, click here to use our contact form to send us a message at any time and we’ll respond within a day. We will provide you with a free consultation, review, and recommendation on how to improve your parish website.

So how ready is your Catholic church website for 2015? Let us know in the comments below. How many things can you check off?

The Future of Open Source Catholic

Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

When I started Open Source Catholic in 2009, I was hoping to create a centralized resource for Catholics who were involved in OSS, sharing of ideas, tips and techniques for technology and web use for Catholic organizations, and a forum for Catholic software and app developers.

I was also employed by the Church at the time, and spent a good deal of time working on the problem of the Catholic Church being far behind tech trends in the wider tech world.

Times have changed, this site has basically been on mothballs for a couple years, and besides keeping the site patched for security updates, I haven’t really had any incentive/plans to keep the site or the community going.

If someone else in the OSC community would like to take the reins, host the site, etc., I’d be happy to turn this over to them. Otherwise, my plan at this point is to turn the site into a static site, put it on mothballs permanently, and close out the social media accounts.

Are there any objections? Any feedback on this plan? I’ve been putting off this decision for some time, but it seems the time has come to do something about it, as crawlers (which aren’t respecting robots.txt, and which I don’t want to spend time fighting) have begun to practically DoS the server this site is on from time to time, and activity throughout the OSC realm has dropped to basically nil.

Church.io OneBody directory and social networking software

Fri, 25 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

While browsing Hacker News today, I noticed a neat project by Tim Morgan, OneBody. It is described as a “private member portal for churches” that offers “church directory and social networking” for your Church.

There’s a great discussion in the Hacker News thread (Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I’ve been hacking on for 7 years), and you can get involved with the project (or just download the software) from Church.IO.