Ekklesia CMS

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Introduction ​

Ekklesia CMS is a headless, multilingual, open-source content management system purpose-built for churches and religious organizations — primarily in Francophone Africa and the African diaspora in Europe.

The Problem ​

Churches in Togo, DRC, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Cameroon, and the francophone diaspora in Belgium and France are currently managing their online presence with tools that were never designed for them:

  • WordPress — bloated, insecure without maintenance, culturally generic, English-first
  • Western church software (ChurchSuite, Planning Center) — priced in USD/GBP, built for Western congregation structures, no mobile money support
  • WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets — for everything else

Nobody has built the right tool for this context. Ekklesia is that tool.

What Ekklesia Provides ​

A church administrator in Lomé or Kinshasa gets:

  • A clean French-first admin panel powered by Filament v5
  • Sermon management — audio, video, transcripts, series, scripture references
  • Event coordination — calendar, registration, capacity management
  • Member directory — cell groups, households, baptism records, pastoral notes
  • Attendance tracking — service types, QR check-in, trend dashboards
  • Giving records — funds, campaigns, multi-currency support (XOF, XAF, EUR, USD)
  • Prayer wall — prayer requests, commitments, answered prayers
  • Daily devotionals — series, scheduling, multi-channel delivery
  • Testimony sharing — moderation workflow, culturally appropriate reactions
  • Bible reading plans — streak tracking, progress monitoring
  • SMS bulk messaging — scheduled delivery, audience targeting
  • Birthday & anniversary auto-notifications — configurable per tenant
  • An AI assistant that drafts announcements, summarizes sermons, and answers how-to questions in French
  • Multilingual content — French, English, and local language support on the roadmap

A developer in the community gets:

  • A clean Laravel 12 + Filament v5 codebase to extend
  • A headless REST API with 60+ endpoints to build any frontend against
  • A plugin architecture following Filament's own conventions
  • Full self-hosting capability with Docker and FrankenPHP

What Ekklesia Is Not ​

Ekklesia is not a general-purpose CMS. It will never try to compete with WordPress at scale or replace Contentful for enterprise content teams. It is a focused tool for a specific, underserved community — and that focus is its strength.

Project Status ​

Ekklesia has completed Phases 0–5 and is actively building Phase 6 — Premium Modules. The core CMS, API layer, AI assistant, and 9 production-readiness features are fully implemented with 568 passing tests (1561 assertions).

Status: Alpha

Ekklesia is in active development. The core architecture is stable, but the API contract and plugin system may still evolve before v1.0 stable.

Next Steps ​

Released under the MIT License.

Ekklesia CMS — Built for the African Church