My wife works for a lutheran school as the secretary, the same school my daughter goes to. Unfortunately, it’s primarily a Windows environment. It was 100% windows until I donated a linux server to handle their backups. But now that the machine is in there, it opens the door to using and utilizing a number of web-based applications. I already have mediawiki setup on the thing so that they can start utilizing it for notes and items to each other. It will take some time for them to use this system, and be comfortable with it, but that’s ok.

However, right now they’re looking into software to handle donations and receipts (because they are an independent school), and also some limited CRM capabilities; i.e. to have information on donors and the ability to quickly print out mailing labels based on certain criteria (i.e. did the person attend the golf tournament, did they donate in the last year, etc.).

The closest thing I’ve found so far is ChurchLedger, but my wife has played with it a bit and it’s too geared to churches, and too complicated for her to use. I’m trying to convince her (and, by proxy, the school) to use something open so that if, in 5 years, things go wrong or the developer of the app they’re currently looking at dies, etc. that they have something easy to maintain and that anyone can look into. Originally they wanted her to develop something in Access and were going to pay for courses for her.

Any suggestions on something that could be used here, meeting the criteria of being able to print out donation receipts, mailing labels, perhaps some rudimentary bulk mailing feature, that is preferably written in PHP (or perl), and uses PostgreSQL or MySQL to store the data? I had considered whipping up something on my own, but don’t have the time right now to invest/donate something like that. Any suggestions of potential candidates would be useful. It has to be web-based as they’re currently using windows on the desktop systems, but I’m hoping that will change over the next year or so.

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