I’ve been working on Stafftool for a long while now and am deeply familiar with it, so I often take for granted just what Stafftool is and what I’m trying to accomplish with it. So, I’ll try to lay that all out as best as I can here.
Stafftool started out when I realized that my church had basically no internal system for keeping track of everything they were doing. Being a Mac based church (woo!), the options available to them were pretty slim — most church-specific software tends to be built solely for Windows, or is some hideous port of an ancient Filemaker Pro standalone database. They’d been having a weekly meeting where they attempted to synchronize their activities and news, and proceeded to maintain their own address books, icals and emails. After poking around a bit, I learned that a lot of churches (even ones much larger than our smallish church) were basically running the whole show by emailing Excel spreadsheets around and hoping to keep in sync. I decided to try to do something about this. Being a web developer (of the Ruby on Rails variety), I naturally figured that a nice web app would be the best approach - cross platform, inherently networked, accessible (almost) anywhere, and potential usable by much more than the staff in the future with an API of some sort. So, I set out to work building the app in my copious spare time.
I started out designing the interface and decided that it would have to be a combination of familiar simplicity in the 37signals vein, but also have some new ideas to make the entry and retrieval of records as effortless as possible if this was to become a tool that much of the staff was going to be using day in and day out. Soon, the first design concepts were complete, and included the notions of “sheets” for both entry and retrieval. This would allow records to be entered and viewed from pretty much anywhere within the site. The initial interface designs have evolved and been tweaked much over time, but remain, for the most part, intact with the initial vision.
I had a nearly complete working version after a couple months, and was happy with the progress I had made…but after attending RailsConf ‘06 and learning about the new directions Rails was taking and the beauty of a RESTful core, I knew I had to do something drastic…so, I basically scrapped what I had and started the back end over from scratch. And, even though it made everything take much longer, I’m glad I did.
They say you should always throw out your first attempt at a project, and that rang true. The new version is so much better in terms of the architecture that it’s a much better foundation for the launch and the future that I have so many plans for. It truly is much more of a platform now that has so many possibilities for expansion and integration with other viewports than just a desktop-based browser, and I’m really excited to finally be nearing the point where you all can start using it to make your churches, non-profits, small groups - whatever you have in mind - much easier to manage.
I plan on writing a bunch more on the development of Stafftool, features I’m excited about, and anything else that I feel is important to the product and what I’m trying to accomplish with it. Hope you enjoy.
