Church operations are connected. The software should be too.
A volunteer is also a member, part of a household, and someone a team may need to follow up with. Yet their information often lives in separate tools. Staff spend time reconciling systems, and volunteers experience the gaps as repeated questions or missed communication.
My work for The Garden brings those relationships into a common platform. Replacing Planning Center is part of the goal, but the deeper requirement is continuity: a useful member experience and a reliable operating system for the people running the church.
The public experience and the work behind it.
The platform spans the public and member website, staff administration, people and household records, giving, check-in, service planning, team scheduling, communications, and work management. Shared packages carry the same domain rules, types, and validation across those surfaces.
People search supports pagination, filters, saved views, and server-side counts beyond the earlier directory limit. Follow-up workflows have owners, due dates, and states. Service plans account for role onboarding, weekday availability, and independent responses to individual services. Communication templates, previews, and retry-safe batches help staff communicate without accidentally duplicating a send.
Shared information does not mean unrestricted access.
Permissions follow roles, departments, ownership, and explicit access rules. Sensitive fields are protected on the server, not merely hidden in the interface. Household schedule sharing is consent-based, and people-merging work accounts for relationships and concurrent edits.
Garden Work extends a self-hosted Plane Community foundation for staff work management, with access projected from the Garden platform. I integrated that existing foundation rather than treating it as a second identity system. Demonstration workflows also use isolated data, so training and review do not require exposing real member records.
A replacement earned one real workflow at a time.
The implementation includes meaningful validation: a synthetic directory with 10,005 records, browser checks at mobile and desktop widths, and reviews of administrative and member workflows. Those checks establish implementation behavior; they do not mean every feature has completed production rollout or migration.
The Planning Center replacement remains staged. Check-in details, remaining integration gates, data migration, and staff acceptance have to be completed in context. The same shared foundation leaves room for future native clients without promising a native app that has not launched.
About this case study +
Garden repository architecture, Planning Center implementation notes, Church Center replacement audit, staff-work verification, and demo-mode documentation. Directory volume is synthetic test evidence, not congregation size.
Researched and updated October 3, 2026.