A lot of functionality is planned for the E-Deacon system; as development continues, here are some of the drop-in modules you can expect to see:
The Services module's job is to help you manage your church services. It's kind of generic to start with, since it does its work primarily by working with the other service-oriented modules you choose.
By itself, the Services module manages the order of the various elements of your service. Those elements are provided by installing any of the following additional modules.
The Sermons module tracks the sermons preached in your church services. By default it provides you with the ability to list and categorize all your sermons, as well as see when they were last preached.
If you also install the Recordings module, you can post audio recordings of sermons and add them to a podcast.
The Music module is designed to help track your church's music ministry. It helps you organize the songs you use in services, suggests songs by key or by topic, and tells you when you used a particular song last so that you know how often you're using it.
In addition to tracking songs, the Music module also tracks the musicians who make up your ministry. Using the simple interface provided, you can keep track of who plays what, when they're available, and when they've said they're interested in playing.
If you also install the Recordings module, you can post practice tracks in a secure area on the site for your musicians to listen to. Please keep in mind, however, that you should never use E-Deacon as a platform for publishing audio (or anything else, for that matter) that you do not have the legal right to publish.
The Families module allows you to organize the site's members into their family groups to help keep track of how everyone is related. It also provides parental control possibilities for parents concerned about their childrens' participation in the community aspects of your E-Deacon church website.
The Directory module provides a place where church members can enter their contact information so that church members can find other church members. Various permission settings are available to ensure that this information is kept as secure as you'd like it to be.
The Small Groups module is designed to help facilitate small group ministry. Small group leaders and potential members alike can use this module to connect to one another; those interested in small groups can search by any number of useful criteria, and those looking for members can do likewise.
Each small group will also have a place to post information of various kinds for the benefit of its members.
The Gifts module keeps track of the spiritual gifts, skills, talents, and interests of church members. Members can enter this information in themselves through a simple interface; alternatively, church leadership can also put in information about members' gifts. Either way, the system will help church leaders find people with particular skillsets more easily.
If you also install the Opportunities module, the system will be able to suggest various ministry opportunities to members on the basis of their gifts and interests. For instance, if John Smith is a gifted pianist and the worship leader has posted an opportunity for musicians to get involved, John Smith and the worship leader can find one another with just a couple of clicks.
The Forums module provides an easy-to-set-up online discussion system that you can organize however you'd like. For instance, you might set up a forum for discussing your church with interested non-members, or you might set up another for commenting on the latest week's sermon.
The Events module helps you keep track of your church's calendar. Events can be organized in any number of ways; for instance, you might have several different calendars, each belonging to a particular small group. Events can also be linked in to related multimedia, like pictures and recordings, provided that those modules are also installed.
The Opportunities module makes it possible for you to see at a glance all the various ministry opportunities in which your church's members might participate. If you also install the Gifts module, the Opportunities module can suggest particular members for particular opportunities on the basis of what they're interested in or skilled at.
Opportunities can be associated with objects from other modules as well, making it really easy to integrate them into the rest of your church's data.
The Pictures module provides a place for church administrators and members alike to post pictures of various church-related events, people, or anything else. Permission settings are fine-grained, meaning that administrators can determine who gets to post what, so that no one's privacy is disrespected.
The Recordings module provides you a place to store service-related audio and, when it's yours to publish, to publish it via all the most convenient methods the Internet has to offer. This includes providing links to audio on your site itself as well as automatically publishing a podcast that you can register with any podcast provider.
This module interfaces particularly well with the Sermons and Music modules, as both of those modules provide extra information about the kinds of things you might want to provide recordings of.
The Giving module provides your members with a simple online interface for tracking what they've given and/or promised to give over the course of a specified time period. It also makes it easy for church administrators to track the church's planned and actual giving records as a whole, as an aid to managing the church's budget.
For privacy's sake, individual giving records will only be made available to the individual who did the giving; administrators will be able to track general trends, but not specific givers.
The Tags module is probably the most convenient way of organizing all your church's data into easy-to-find groupings. Tags are arbitrary short words or phrases that can be assigned to any data in your system; users can then use the tag navigator to find information via these tags.
For instance, you might have posted a sermon, several songs, and three events that all have something to do with the concept "Grace". By assigning the tag "Grace" to these items, you create a connection between all of them that helps users get from one to the other really easily.
The Ratings module gives users the opportunity to rate any content in the system on a scale of one to five. This system makes it possible for your users to tell you what information in the system they found to be most useful, so that that information can be provided more easily to other users.
The Comments module makes it possible for users to leave comments about the various content that your church's E-Deacon system holds. Users can also reply to other comments, which effectively makes every page a message board for users to communicate with one another about your church's information.