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Communique - The open church communications iPhone app.

Communique is an open source iPhone/iPod Touch application created to allow Christian churches to share information and media with members. The application currently has four main features:

  • Display recent messages/sermons with support for video, audio or both.
  • Multitasking while playing audio is supported. (Thanks to Cliff 2/6/2011)
  • A news tab that lists the content of an RSS feed
  • A media tab for other videos that the church would like to share with its community.
  • Two different views that give general information such as website, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, address and phone numbers.

This code is licensed under the GPL version 2. You can find a link to the license here. You are welcome to use the code and modify it for use in an iPhone application for your ministry, but it is NOT intended to be used for profit. If you do use the code please consider contributing code or documentation back to the project.

History

This application was developed at Sugar Creek Baptist Church by the Creative Communications department. Sugar Creek's application released to the iTunes Application store in March of 2010.

Why Open Source?

  • Provide an application that allows churches to leverage the iPhone/iPod Touch as a communication medium.
  • Build a community around the application and allow other developers to join and build a better application.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to improve the Communique. We selected Github to host the code to make it easy for developer/designers to contribute features and bug fixes. If you are interested in helping out, see instructions below:

Bugs and Feature Requests

Please use the issue queue for submitting bugs and feature requests.

Developers

Simply create a github account then fork the code. Make the bug fix or feature addition and submit a pull request. Rick will be notified and review the change and merge it into the project.

Graphics

If you want to be a geeky graphics person, download the iPhone SDK, design new graphics, update the views using Interface Builder. Then just use the developers instructions above. If you want to just use Photoshop then post your graphics to a site or flickr and open an issue with a link to the graphic suggestions. Then a developer can add it to the application.

Contributors

Rick Russell - Project Lead/Developer
Cliff Seal - Development (AVFoundation updates for 4.0 and multitasking of audio)
Bobby Chandler - Graphics
SCBC Creative Communications Team - Application Design

iPhone Applications based on the Communique App

If you use the Communique for your church, please email [email protected] so that we can add you to this page

Sugar Creek Baptist Church - Sugar Creek

Building Communique

The application is written in Objective-C using Xcode against the iPhone SDK. We have included the Xcode project file with the source code.

To Build:

  1. Register with Apple and download the iPhone SDK
  2. Install GIT on you Mac (an installer Git OS X Installer)
  3. Clone the repository using terminal
    git clone git://github.com/sugarcreek/communique.git
  4. Open the communique.xcodeproject using XCode
  5. Build and Go

Branching For Your Church

  1. At a terminal change to the directory that you clone from GitHub
  2. Execute commands:
    git branch yourchurch
    git checkout yourchurch
  3. Edit the file communique-info.plist in Xcode and change the "Bundle display name" to the name of your application. i.e. Sugar Creek
  4. Under targets in Xcode double click on communique target and select the build tab.
  5. With the Configuration of "All Configurations" selected scroll down to the "Product Name" property and change it to your application name. i.e. sugarcreek

Now you are ready to make the rest of your customizations.

The Application Data

The data used in the application are based on standard RSS feeds. One feed for the meessages, news, and creative media. Each feed is parsed when the application is loaded in the background using the FeedLoader class and an operation queue. The feeds can be standard RSS feeds used for news readers or podcast feeds. To change the feeds, just modify the urls that are static NSStrings in the communiqueAppDelegate.m file.

static NSString *const CreativeMediaFeed = @"http://www.sugarcreek.tv/ip_creative_feed.xml"; static NSString *const SermonMediaFeed = @"http://feeds.feedburner.com/SugarCreekBaptistChurchVideoPodcastForIphone"; static NSString *const NewsFeed = @"http://www.sugarcreek.net/news/feed.xml";

A few custom fields have been added to a few of feeds to get thumbnails and to have a single feed for both audio and video on the MediaDetailViewController. The fields need to be added to each of the items in the feeds inside of the tags. Example:

<audioLink>http://flv-pd.sugarcreek.tv/sermons/2010/20100425.mp3</audioLink> <thumbnail>http://sugarcreek.tv/iphone/2010/whwwd.jpg</thumbnail>

The SermonMediaFeed user audioLink and thumbnail tag. The CreativeMediaFeed uses the thumbnail tag only.

If you have a suggestion on how to better handle this extra data please open a Issue and we can discuss changing it.

Video and Audio Support

The standard SDK media player is being used for playback of content currently. Audio can be any format that the iPhone/iPod can play (i.e. MP3/AAC). Video can be a little tricky as we found when submitted the Sugar Creek application for approval the first time. Bit rates on the video need to be limited based on which network you would like to allow your viewers to use.

  • 3G: Quicktime H.264 320x240 at 300kbps
  • Wifi: Anything supported by the iPhone for video

Currently the application is not limiting access to 3G or Wifi, but the code could be easily modified as we are checking for access to a network connection in the code. If you plan on doing video at bit rates higher then 300 make sure you limit the video playback to Wifi only connected devices.