Status Update

Confused about where to start?  Let’s break it down.

Development and Outlook

2024 in Retrospect

It could be said that 2024 was the year of hard decisions and hard work.  After working through 2023 with the assistance of Troy Reynolds and Nghia Ta of NTA Creative, we hit the wall.  Troy became consumed with other projects and a job change (not to mention a growing family), and Nghia had only been able to contribute to a limited (but intense!) degree.  Soe we needed to seek other outside resources for further code development.  As we engaged in this search, we repeatedly got the feedback that the platform upon which the app was built (.NET and JS primarily – and a rather outdated version at that) was outdated and many respondents began proposing starting over as opposed to developing further.  We really did not want to have to go back to the beginning, but it quickly became apparent that we had little other choice.  We wanted to keep a broad field of developers with a more common platform approach, and we also wanted to make the app more universal for other interfaces and eventually for mobile application.  

So we agreed to bite the bullet and start over. 

New Development

We went through a phase of vendor selection – with a lot of help from Troy, who knew the system quite well, he himself diving into it a year or so prior – and found a good candidate, Fulsy, based in India (www.fulsy.com).  While being cautious about getting realistic offers, it was apparent that they were able to grasp what we were looking to do and made a compelling offer.   So we began work in June, 2024.

We fine-tuned our work flow and information flow for the system, and used the previous development as a benchmark upon which to build and improve.  This time, the system was being developed on Laravel PHP and MySQL.  

We started with a porting of the database structure and schema, and eventually made our way through user roles, pages, forms and data import and export.  We have reached the point of creating appointments using a map view showing the availability status of district churches for selected dates, and the first notifications sent during various steps in the workflow.

Current Status

Now we are going through more intensive testing, now that data can be imported and the various function are being implemented.  We hope to get enough testing and debugging complete during January and February to resume beta testing in March.  

Stay tuned for more updates here in the next weeks. 

ems