I work a lot with Filemaker and, because I’m able to rapidly deploy quality database-driven solutions on it, it’s often my first choice for getting something done.  Then I evaluate - is this worth the time I’d need to invest to port it over to objective-C or PHP/MySQL?

Well, I’ve been working on a Church management database - at least, I did a few years ago. I’d actually forgotten about it until recently when my wife asked me to print a nice baptismal form for Lazar.  So I popped open my long forgotten software and realized it was actually pretty excellent.  I had some grand plans for this, but stalled halfway through because of job changes and life changes.

Anyhow, I decided last night to carve out the baptismal record creation part of it and make it a stand alone application. Basically, you open up the application and create a new baptismal record by filling out the necessary fields.  After that, it keeps it as long as you keep the application. At any time, you can print:

1) An Excerpt Form - in our diocese, this is the ‘official’ form that functions as the proof of baptism.

2) A Certificate with a Border - 8.5x11, landscaped certificate for family records.

3) A Certificate without a Border - created so I could print the innards of my certificate onto fancy-border paper form Staples.

My only complaint w/ Filemaker’s stand-alone solution is the App it creates is very large, where a natively developed App would be very small (100MB).  The good thing about Filemaker is this should work on Mac or PC.

So let me know if you’re interested in downloading it and I’ll send you the link - the app is FREE w/ certificate printing.  Since Excerpt Forms are diocese specific, I’ve added an ‘upgrade’ paid link so I can work with people that would like me to customize everything for them (including changing the style of the certificates to suit different tastes).