E-Deacon is an open source church management solution, designed from the ground up to help track all sorts of ministry-related data and activity. For instance, a music minister might use E-Deacon to keep track of songs used in services, or a pastor might use it to keep track of recent topics addressed. Community features are also planned whereby church members can specify their interests and gifts so as to help church administrators place them into various service opportunities available in the ministry.
In short, E-Deacon's job is to manage the detail work that so often gets in the way of believers using the gifts God has given them to the fullest. It is not a replacement for those gifts or for the people who use them; rather, it is a tool to help make church administrative work easier to manage.
E-Deacon works the way you want it to, and doesn't require you to install any features that you think might get in your way. Rather, when you install E-Deacon, you get to pick and choose from a rapidly-growing number of modules, each containing the specific functionality you're looking for.
For example, let's say you're a music minister looking for help organizing your songs, set lists, and musicians. If you install the Music module, you'll have all kinds of tools at your disposal for making this happen. On the other hand, if you're not interested in the music module's features, you don't need to install it; that way it's useful to those who need it, and out of the way of those who don't.
On the technical side of things, the E-Deacon project is written in fully object-oriented PHP 5 and optimized for use with a MySQL backend database (with plans to extend the system to support other RDBMSs in the future). It is built on the open source Zend Framework, which in combination with E-Deacon's module manager makes the development of additional third-party modules a breeze; this makes it possible for your individual church to extend E-Deacon even beyond the existing modules, so that it works just how you like it.
Currently there isn't much code to speak of, although the project's Subversion repository is growing daily. If you're interested in seeing how the project is progressing, that would be a great place to start. In the meantime, you can also check out the other features available at the E-Deacon Sourceforge project page.
Thank you very much for your interest in the E-Deacon project; please check back here regularly for more news and updates.