CMS's

[Jim Gilbert]

I should have looked here before posting in "Introduce yourself". I am interested in exchanging ideas & experiences people have had in developing their own CMS for their church's website. I'm very happy with the system I've built for our church. They have the ability to manage just about every piece of information displayed on the site, including the ability to build simple dynamic pages and link to them from other dynamic objects.

But I know it can always be better and I'd love to see what everyone is doing with their content management.

God bless,
Jim

[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

[tgriesbach]

Jim,

I would love to discuss ideas you have. I have been managing our site and have slowly built up part of a CMS system to support it. Our site currently allows staff to manage calendars, news, the homepage, e-invites and some pages.

It currently is built using the free technologies (php and mysql) and I have long debated converting to a more sophisticated technology based on J2EE and Oracle (this is where my professional experience lies). My longer term goal is to create a reusable package which other ministries could leverage (especially those start-up churches without lots of either people or $$$ resources who can benefit greatly from the internet to coordinate their ministry).

Have you done any research into existing software? There are quite a few, some free some commercial. Each one seems to have its own ups/downs. I have done some but would love to hear others opinions.

Thanks,
Tim

[mrbelfry]

I'm currently redesigning my church site (check it out here and tell me what you think (www.lighthousecc.co.uk/test - although it is far from complete) because there is just to much information on it. I've got info on there about our childcare centre and a charity that we run which means that there is important stuff I just don't have space for anyway I digress. The big challenge I face now is how I implement my CMS and how much control I give it.

It makes a huge amount of sense to have the dynamic content controlled by CMS such as calendar and news items- these will be pages where I control the actual content and not how it looks. However I am wondering how much control I give it over individual pages. The major advantage of a CMS is that it allows people without web design skills to update the website. The major disadvantage is that it allows people without web design skills to update the website.

I used a CMS called Mambo on a small website for a youth magazine which gives you a tremendous amount of control of individual pages once you get past the learning curve! I created a nice template for it (imho) and turned it over to the magazine team after spending a few hours with them explaining the system and some do's and don'ts of web design ie don't use a million fonts on a page and don't use images bigger than your house.

I left them with it to put some articles on and without exception 100% of the articles had images that were too big, several changes of fonts and most were in my opinion badly written!

If I'd implemented a system that just let them change the actual text and not the way it was displayed and if I'd not let them upload images then the website would have been a whole load better but the CMS would have been really basic.

So my question is: How much control can I give busy people that don't have the necessary skills to 'make good webpages' over a website?

[David Gillaspey]

So my question is: How much control can I give busy people that don't have the necessary skills to 'make good webpages' over a website?It seems to me that the whole point of a CMS is to separate content (the copy and images that people are allowed or enabled to upload) and the design or display of that content. If a CMS allows a user to select fonts and upload pictures ? I'm not saying they shouldn't, but if the CMS allowed it ? then is the CMS a pure CMS? Has a certain line been crossed? I don't know.

But you raise an interesting point when you talk about allowing people to upload photos. That does require people to have some design sense, and the tools to size and compress a photo correctly. In theory, you could institute some restriction on the actual display size of a photo on a webpage (via programming), so that a photo is never displayed more than 2 inches wide, for example. A person could upload larger photos than that, that get accordingly resized for display, but then the larger photo (and therefore larger file size) is a waste of bandwidth.

In an ideal world, then, you would want to ensure users have design sense and the tools to size photos correctly. But this isn't a perfect world.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[mk_elliott]

How hard can it be to limit the size of graphic uploads... just have the system reject anything over a certain size? (Enforced learning) :)

[David Gillaspey]

How hard can it be to limit the size of graphic uploads... just have the system reject anything over a certain size? (Enforced learning) :)True, but then what? The user may or not have the tools (Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, ImageReady, Fireworks, etc.) to correctly reduce the size of the photo. Web designers and graphic artists will have the tools and the skill to use them, but not necessarily other people.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites