FGBMFI Connect

01. What does it do, and who uses it?

FGBMFI Connect is a fellowship management application designed to help members stay connected and make it easier to manage fellowship activities keeping the whole experience digitalized. It is being built for fellowship members and administrators, with the goal of making communication and member-related processes simpler and more accessible.

02. Why did you pick Hologram? Did you consider anything else?

Hologram has really been making waves in the Elixir ecosystem. The idea of building frontend applications with Elixir, without writing JavaScript, caught my attention, so I decided to try it out.

I actually built a separate frontend with Next.js because I wanted a PWA. But I also wanted to get a feel for Hologram, so I decided to build the frontend with it and see how it would work for a real application.

03. Which parts of Hologram does it rely on most, and for what?

The app relies heavily on Hologram's component model to build reusable UI components, its template system to write the UI in Elixir, and its state and action handling for interactive features like form submissions, password visibility, and loading states.

I created reusable components like inputs, password inputs, buttons, and brand elements to keep the pages consistent and avoid repeating markup — you know, that React way of writing components and reusing them across.

• Components
• Template Syntax
• Actions
• Forms

04. What was hard, or almost made you stop?

Honestly, nothing almost made me stop, but there was a bit of a learning curve. Everything clicked after I read the first component AI generated for me. I started to understand the flow and how things work and should be structured in Hologram. After that, I was able to build on that understanding and get going with the application.

05. What do you wish Hologram had?

I will love to see support for a global default layout that applies to pages automatically, while still allowing individual pages to override it with a different layout or ignore a layout.

In my application, I was passing MainLayout to every page. Ability to declare it once would reduce repetition and make layout management more convenient as an application grows.

06. Anything else you'd like people to know?

FGBMFI Connect started with a simple observation at a fellowship gathering: something as basic as taking attendance could be made digital. What began as an idea became an opportunity to explore Hologram by building a real product with it.

The project is still evolving, and I am still having conversations with the leaders of the fellowship and so far, these conversations have helped me think more deeply about accessibility and the different realities of the people who would use it.

I'm excited to keep exploring what's possible with Elixir and Hologram.