Greetings/Content Management

[Jim Gilbert]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to take a moment here to introduce myself. I'm Jim Gilbert, and I've built and manage the website for my church, Knott Avenue Christian Church, in Anaheim, CA.

I keep a very busy schedule, and because of this I knew I wouldn't have a lot of time to devote to maintaining our site once it was done. For this reason I designed the entire site with the goal that the church staff would manage and maintain almost all of the content on it, whtout requiring them to have any programming/and or technical knowledge. There are a number of static pages, but for the most part, the content throughout the site is dynamic and resides in databases.

I've built a content management system for them to manage all this data, and while there are still kinks to work out, It's actually working very well. I was wondering who else here may have experience in this type of project, and maybe we could swap stories, ideas, etc.

God bless,
Jim Gilbert

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for joining the forum.

It happens that one of the previous Questions of the Week was about content management systems, to which mrbelfry responded. I had turned that forum off so as to limit the number of QOTWs that showed. (That'll teach me!) I've made that forum active again so that you can see it. (Refresh your webpage if necessary.) You might wish to correspond with him.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[JackWolfgang]

Welcome, Jim!

Is Knott Avenue a Disciples church or an independent?

[crowsfan85]

Hey Jim,

Welcome. Glad you could stop by. I'd love to talk to you more about your CMS solution that you've been working on. I'm doing the same kind of thing for my church in San Diego. We'll talk about it more in the roundtable.

Welcome again. God bless ya.

[Jim Gilbert]

Hello there,

As far as I'm aware it's independent.



Welcome, Jim!

Is Knott Avenue a Disciples church or an independent?

[Jim Gilbert]

Hi there, thanks for the warm welcome. I'd like to talk about it and share ideas. I don't hit the forums very often (just don't have much free time) so feel free to contact me via email.

Our church was in dire need of a new website, but with the workload on the church staff, I was pretty much left to myself to come up with the content and how to manage it. It's a fairly large church (2,500 +) and very active in ministry and outreach programs so I knew I had to build the site so that they could manage the content themselves quickly and easily, or I would end up spending all my time managing it for them.

I'm not great at layout and design, but if anyone wants to take a look and give me any feedback about it, I'd certainly appreciate it. It's www.kacc.com (http://www.kacc.com).

Blessings,
Jim

Hey Jim,

Welcome. Glad you could stop by. I'd love to talk to you more about your CMS solution that you've been working on. I'm doing the same kind of thing for my church in San Diego. We'll talk about it more in the roundtable.

Welcome again. God bless ya.

[NathanSmith]

Jim, et al...

After "shopping" around for CMS's last summer, I eventually settled on Textpattern - www.textpattern.com (http://www.textpattern.com) because it is free and open-source, and has its own easy-to-learn syntax.

The guy who did the Firefox logo, he uses it for most of his web-design clients, as do several other big-name designers out there. I've used it for several church sites, and they seem to like it alot. If you want to talk more, send me an email via my site.

[ChristianASPNET]

Hi,

I am also very interested in CMS for churches. I'm in the process of gathering information, probably to build in ASP.NET. I've written a couple of CMS applications in the past, but not designed specifically for churches. Does anyone with experience building or using a CMS for their church have any recommendations of essential features, requirements, etc.? What do you think are "must-haves" and "nice-to-haves?"

God bless,
David

[mrbelfry]

I've attempted to get my head around building a cms for my church. Probably the most important thing is that it must be easily skinnable so I can change the look of my site whilst ignoring the backend code. I do this using smarty (http://smarty.php.net).

The big problem I have is getting my head around how to organise and structure the data. I use a mix of static content and db driven stuff. So I have a few generic templates that display data from a db and some hard coded templates which probably isn't that elegant a solution. The other concern I have it how much control to give users who aren't that aware of web design issues and might upload a 2000*4000 res picture and destroy my design. I used the mambo cms once to design a site that was ruined by poor design once I'd handed it over to the people running the site. So that is a question you have to ask.

Other than that I think every church site should display service times on the home page and have contact information in the footer.

[David Gillaspey]

I've attempted to get my head around building a cms for my church. Is this because you don't feel there's any existing proprietary or open-source CMS that would meet your needs?

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[mrbelfry]

I've used a couple of CMS's like Mambo, PHP-Nuke etc and I always felt I was having to force my site to work in a particular way that was 'natural' to that CMS. I guess I never used one that I was totally comfortable with for a church site although I could see lots of applications where they would work very well.

I only used a small proportion of the open source php market so there may be better solutions available. Plus I wanted to give myself some php experience and this seemed like a good project to get to grips with