Home - shawnco/liturgy GitHub Wiki

The liturgy project is my attempt to create something similar to the traditional liturgy of the hours as followed by Benedictine monastics. It stems from a personal religious belief, a fascination in monastic tradition, and also the chance to improve my coding abilities.

In the version of the divine offices that I'm creating here, there are six offices (periods of prayer, Bible reading, and singing): Matins, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. They are intended to be observed at roughly 3 hour intervals during the day.

From a technical standpoint, the project presents a couple interesting challenges. The liturgy project takes advantage of HTML5's <audio> tags, making it easy to sing along with what is proper for that office and season. On the backend, the project is written mainly in PHP, and is currently undergoing refactoring into an object-oriented and model-view-controller scheme. There is a major combinatorics aspect, too. Certain parts (such as the psalm readings at Sext and None) don't cycle perfectly throughout the week, and other parts only appear at specific offices on certain days in specific seasons.