Overview & Initial Ideation

During my internship at Kingsway Church, I had set a goal to create a custom web app that would help my church in any capacity. The idea came after serving one Sunday on my church's tech team. Each Sunday, we had a whiteboard that displayed what mics and in-ear monitor packs each vocalist and musician. This was later replaced by a pinboard that allowed the Production Director, Alex Shourds to print out paper grids with the same information.

This led me to think about how Kingsway organizes who serves on each Sunday. Planning Center is a church software that serves a wide variety of apps that helps (amongst a whole host of other tools) centralize church volunteer information, Sunday service order, and any other notes that church leadership find important each week.

After realizing that Planning Center has an API, that got me thinking. Instead of attempting to see printed out pages in a dark backstage...

What if we used the notes section of Planning Center & create a custom dashboard to be displayed on a TV through a Raspberry Pi?

Tech/Tool Stack:

• Next.JS | JS Framework
• Prismic | Headless CMS made for Next.js, Sveltekit, Nuxt.js
• Vercel | Hosting Platform
• Figma Design | For page prototyping & UI/UX
• Bootstrap CSS | Responsive web design native to Tithe.ly
• VS Code | Primary IDE of choice :[)

Github Repository:

https://github.com/Dmjhop/Kingsway-Backstage-Dashboard

What I am currently working on...

• Universalizing the UI/UX so that other churches outside of Kingsway could implement this app into their production/worship team workflows
• Refactoring the API Call Rate & Implementing Webhooks for better Real-Time Data Updates
• Creating a React Native Mobile Version

What I Enjoyed

This was my first ever project that I have developed all the way to production! Plus, the backstage app is currently still an app the church uses 1 year into release! Releasing the app helped validate for me that building technology for Christ and His Church is one of my main focuses in life! I learned so much between the importance of fundamental concepts like error handling, and just how much of a need there is for version handling with Git/Github! All in all, I really enjoyed creating this app and definitely look forward toward building the project out more and more!

Timeline

January 2024 | Initial Idea & Planning

February 2024 | Development Began

September 2024 | Initial Prototype Complete

October 2024 | First Production Ready Deployed!