Developing a Church Kiosk System

kiosk

At a recent Ministry Leaders’ meeting at church, we mentioned the need for a better system for people to signup for events and classes at church. We have two touchscreen all-in-one computers that were not being fully utilized, so we decided to turn them into signup kiosks.  After just a little bit of work, we came up with a great solution for a touchscreen kiosk system using a website run by WordPress.

If you are thinking about a project like this, here is information to help get you started. First, the web browser Google Chrome can run in a full screen kiosk mode that is not easily closed.  If you create a shortcut on your desktop for Chrome, you can edit the shortcut and add the -kiosk command and then add the website link. When you click the shortcut, the website will be opened full screen with no address bar and no menu. (see here for more detailed instructions)

I created a new website as a subdomain of our church website. The website is a single page, and is built using the Divi theme by Elegant Themes. It consists of several “call to action” modules in the Divi theme.  For each module, you enter the link, the button text, and the title for the block. I also added the Easy Fancybox plugin. By adding a CSS class to the Call to Action module, I forced each button to open up in a pop-up window instead of a separate page. This keeps everything on the same page and allows the kiosk to reset after each use. The links are to events in our church database so that we can track signups. The style is very similar to our main website so the branding is consistent.

It’s a very simple setup, and it has worked great the last few weeks. Our hope is that it will eliminate clipboards and signup sheets from our resource table.  You can view our current kiosk at kiosk.mycornerstone.org

Let me know if you have any questions.

divi-modules

Mike

I am a former design engineer who now pastors Cornerstone Community Church in Galax, Virginia. I'm passionate about following Jesus and I love technology. I've been married to Jennifer for 28 years, and we have three adult children.

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7 Responses

  1. Braden Cook says:

    On the backend, how is your database set up to track and display the signups?

  2. Mike says:

    We use a church management system called Churchteams – http://www.churchteams.com
    Each event is a separate group. The leader of the event is notified by email whenever someone signs up. It’s working great for us.

  3. Kirk Martin says:

    Hi Mike,
    We are considering somethink like your kiosk for not only sign-ups for events, but for announcements as well. I saw you had events in your current kiosk. I wonder how easy it would be to take the information about an event and have the kiosk user send him/herself a text, email and calendar appointment regarding the events/

    • Mike says:

      That sounds like an interesting idea. I’m not sure how you could do it though. There are several great WordPress plugins for events, and some offer event reminders emails, but each person would have to signup for each event. I think it may be a little tough to get it working smoothly. If your Church Management System has event signups, you can always email everyone who has signed up with the information about the event. Thanks for stopping by the blog.

  4. Cameron says:

    Hey Mike,
    Thanks for the great idea. I love it. But, can you elaborate on the CSS class you added and where exactly? I’m having trouble getting that component to work.

    • Mike says:

      Cameron, I am using an older Divi theme 2.3.2. The change required is on line 3007 of the functions.php file.

      a class=”et_pb_promo_button fancybox-iframe”

      Hope this helps

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