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Frequently Asked Questions
General:
What is InfoCentral?
How much does InfoCentral cost?
Who developed InfoCentral?
How is it free, exactly?
Why is it being released to the public?
How stable and complete is InfoCentral?
How can I help with the project?
Why is it called InfoCentral?
How can I contact the InfoCentral team and where can I get/offer help?
Technical:
How do I run InfoCentral?
What software do I need to run InfoCentral?
What type of server do I need?
What kind of client computers do I need?
What if I only have one computer?
Where do I get a Web server?
Where do I get a MySQL database server?
How do I Install InfoCentral?
General
| InfoCentral is a web-based application that allows a church to
store and retrieve information about its individual members, their
families, and the groups they belong to in the church. InfoCentral
runs from a central computer (the "server"), and all
the other computers (the "clients") access it via a Web
browser such as Netscape Navigator or Mozilla. |
| InfoCentral is absolutely free. You can download it from this
Web site. Be aware, however, that you need certain pieces of software
installed to run InfoCentral. (All the necessary software is usually
free as well.) |
| InfoCentral was originally built by a single Web developer, Deane
Barker, in his spare time to be used by his church to track membership
and participation in various groups. Since then, InfoCentral has
been modified and improved by a handful of developers who have
donated their time to the project. Recently, Chris Gebhardt, of
the OpenServe project, took responsibility as the lead developer.
We intend to greatly expand the functionality of InfoCentral in
the near future with features such as group member data, contributions,
event planning, resource scheduling, and much more! |
| InfoCentral is distributed under the General Public License (GPL).
It can be freely distributed (and modified if you have the experience)
to any person or organization. If you make changes, please send
them to us for consideration of inclusion in the next official
release. |
| InfoCentral is released to the open-source community for the same
reason most other software is--InfoCentral fills a need many churches
have. Most all churches need to track their members for record
keeping and other purposes. InfoCentral has been very successful
for the church in which it's currently installed, and it's our
hope that other churches can have this same success.
Additionally, many users of InfoCentral have ideas and changes
they'd like to see reflected in the software. These changes and
the continued support of the software are beyond the capacity of
a single developer. Releasing InfoCentral to the open-source community
opens the source code to thousands of developers that may have
the time and inclination to improve the software. |
| 1.2.x is the current release version. 1.3.0 is currently under development.
We know of dozens of current installations, and in one case it
has been tracking the congregation of 2,500+ people and 500+ families
for the last year. It has been remarkably stable with almost 100%
uptime, despite the relatively underpowered server on which it's
been running. |
| First, download, install, and use the latest development version
of InfoCentral. We need to know about bugs and ways to make the
software better. If you're so inclined, feel free to make changes
to the code and send them to us so we can review then for inclusion
in a future release. Visit our Developing InfoCentral page for
more information on where the project needs help. All discussion
of development happens in our forums. |
| It keeps information in a central location. The first church in
which it was installed was Central Baptist Church in Sioux Falls,
South Dakota. That, along with the name of the church, resulted
in the name InfoCentral. |
| Please use our forums. We no longer use e-mail for initial correspondence. |
Technical
| Running InfoCentral isn't complicated if you have experience with Web
applications. If you don't, there's a few things to get used to, but
no problems that can't be overcome. What's important to understand
is that InfoCentral is a Web-based application, which means it has
two distinct sides:
The "server", on which the application actually runs. This is a centrally located computer
that stores the files and information the InfoCentral needs to run
The "client", through which a user interacts with the system via a Web browser.
There is only one server, but there can be an unlimited number of clients. |
In a nutshell:
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| A PHP-compatible Web server |
| The MySQL database server |
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There's more detail on these items below.
InfoCentral can be run entirely with free software. In fact, that's half the point of it! |
| Almost any computer will do. We run the InfoCentral demo on a 450 Mhz Celeron
with 128MB of RAM with no problems, and it was initially developed
on a 233 Mhz Pentium II with 48MB of RAM. The computer can be running
almost any operating system (OS): Windows 9x/2000/XP, Linux, BSD,
Solaris, MacOS, etc., so long as the OS can support a PHP-compatible
Web server (such as Apache), and can run the MySQL database server
(runs on both Windows and Linux/Unix). Of course, we hope you will save
yourself some money and frustration by using Linux or one of the BSDs. |
| Any computer with a Web browser -- Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, whatever.
The interface will work fine with any reasonably standards-compliant
web browser. Once again, you can save a lot of money if you use
Free Software like Linux and Mozilla! (: |
| That's fine, so long as the computer satisfies the requirements
for both the server and client. Both sides of InfoCentral can be
on the same computer. |
| We highly recommend the free Apache Web Server (www.apache.org), which will work on Windows,
Linux or about any flavor of Unix. A few extra steps may be involved
to add PHP functionality. (See the Apache documentation, or, with most Linux distributions,
just install the appropriate packages, usually called something like "php4") |
| MySQL is available from www.mysql.com. It is available for all major operating systems. |
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Latest News:
Project re-purposing.. Stay tuned..
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