One of the tasks I’ve been working on this week is adapting the website I developed to support the worship team at St Clement’s – refactoring it, to use the technical term – in order to bring the same things to bear at ASTAD. This provides a rota for the team along with a list of songs we’ve played, showing what has been popular over various time periods, like the last year or last three months. Where available, songs have links to the CCLI SongSelect service and it is possible to see who is leading with a given song or what keys are used for it most often.

Some of the work was simple, like backing up and then clearing out old data. I’ve kept the list of songs, which will be a useful starting point, but I’m now working with a different set of people on a new services and including some instruments, like sax, which I didn’t previously have the chance to draw upon.

Other parts were more involved. For example, a weakness of the previous system was that I only recorded the date when a song was played and used that to link to the list of services. This obscured information when we had more than one service on a given date. I now link performances to individual services, which sounds simple but required redoing some gnarly SQL and also updates to the PHP code creating the relevant pages.

The job seems to be done though and I’ve got the songs from last week entered on. Now I’m waiting for the data from tomorrow’s service and then I’ll send a link out to members of the team and start using it to work up the rota for December, once they let me know about their availability.