WordPress for Website

[esco4466]

Hey,
im considering changing our site (http://www.hopeworks.us) to a wordpress site. I am having trouble learning everything. IAny advice as to if this is a good idea and if it is how to do it. I really like http://www.marshillchurch.org and their blog look. I don't know if technically that is a blog. How do they get the flash in their if it is? But their is a link to the left that says Vox Pop Network. That is where all their various ministries and campus sites are. I have been testing it out with our youth page (http://www.nrgyouth.org). Any ideas? Advice?

[generalhavok]

The Mars Hill website is almost certainly not a WP site. If you look at the source code, you'll see that the pages aren't "html", they're "aspx". The huge block of code confirms that the site is built on the .NET framework.

Unless you're proficient in writing C++ or VB or even C#, you're not going to make a site that does what Mars Hill's site does.

When it comes to learning how to work with WP, the best place to start is on their website. They have a large and active community of folks who are very willing to help others learn.

[tmreg]

I have built only one Wordpress site, so I am hardly the expert, but I plan on building more. The wordpress site will certainly play better with google than your current flash site (cool looking as it is). I think you will find the flash thumbnail gallery your example has will be easy to add with a few plugins. You will need to find the flash script and then find a plugin that will let you add a html portion to the top of your page. You could always make your front page an HTML page and have a link to the "blog" portion of your site.

Another benifit of switching is that it will be easier to add content than to your flash site. I would recommend it. that's my $.02 .

[mrbelfry]

I've just done it so I'll tell you how I did it. First I moved my site to a blog structure because I wanted to offer more value to the church - rather than just a bunch of semi-static pages with only really event information that might be useful - plus there is a lot of stuff that happens in the church that can easily get missed because it might not be a high profile ministry or only a few people went. In theory the blog strucutre allows ministry leaders and 'normal' church attenders to get a bit if exposure for what they do (assuming they contribute regularly) and more accurately reflects the life of the church (in my opinion) which is a potentially a bigger draw for people looking for a church than a ton of out of date text.

The emphasis for me then was the blog and the semi-static information fits around that rather than the other way round. I started by mooching around the church websites mainly found in David's directory and a few other places to get inspiration. I also looked around in the wordpress theme directories to see what it could do.

When I had a vague idea in my mind of the kind of look I was going for I blocked out the site on a piece of paper - so i drew a few squares and labelled them (virtually every site I've ever designed looks the same - there is a banner and sometimes navigation at the top, a side bar on the left and the content filling the rest of the width and then a footer at the bottom).

I then made a mockup of the home page during which time the design still had the same structure (banner, sidebar, content and footer) but the dressing changed quite drastically - I wasn't happen with what I was doing - hit a wall - prayed and then the current site happened within a few days.

I then installed wordpress - studied some of the templates I downloaded to see how the wordpress template tags worked - and set about building the wordpress site from the html mockup I'd done - basically amounted to copy and pasting and then substituting the hard coded info with the wordpress template tags.

A simple theme (like mine) is really easy to do. You need one php file called index.php which takes care of outputting your posts. This can take care of everything and wordpress uses a bunch of invisible defaults for things like comments etc UNLESS you create a template for it. So I have a number of static pages - wordpress can process this using the standard index.php file and treats a page like a post.

I wanted my page pages to be slightly different so I created a page.php file that would handle all the page requests (a page is essentially a static post). I didn't have to make any changes to the wordpress files but just dropped this template in the right directory and wordpress took care of it automagically. A simple theme like mine is really easy to make work wordpress.

The mars hill site isn't wordpress but it should be straightforward to do something similar.

I found the wordpress documents a little confusing so if I can be of any help let me know

Thanks

[ibda12u]

Not trying to get off topic at all, but that marshill site can actually be pretty straight forward to implement if you use an an app such as dotnetnuke.

Of course it's a entirely different CMS, but you can achieve some really solid designs, without having to learn a lot about C# or VB to utilize it.
It just takes a little bit of creativity, and it can be accomplished.

[esco4466]

ya'll are a big help. But I have no idea what you are saying. I am very humbled. I am learning all this as I go as I have no training in web design. I will continue to research what those things mean, CMG, and all that. Please give me more advice.

[esco4466]

looked at dotnetnuke. wow. extremely written in Chinese. its impossible to follow. I dont even know where to start to install.

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Jim,

Here's a website that lists and provides user reviews of a large number of open-source (free) web Content Management Systems, a/k/a CMS's, that are typically based on the programming language PHP and the mySQL database server (both also open source).

http://opensourcecms.com

The web hosting world is divided, more or less, into two camps:

* Computers running Linux (operating system) and Apache (the actual web hosting software) — both open-source; you should be detecting a pattern here.

* Computers running Windows (operating system) and Windows web serving software; these hosting plans are generally more expensive, but are used widely in business. The Mars Hill site would be hosted on this platform, since .NET is a Microsoft proprietary programming solution.

I'll just be blunt and encourage you to go open-source. Web hosters running open-source programs (camp #1 above) abound. You can get open-source hosting for as little as US$5 a month, but you'll probably want the features available with plans that cost between US$5 and US$10 a month. Most offer click-to-install CMS and blogging programs, though those won't be the most current versions.

Anyway, the website mentioned above provides user reviews of many many open-source web programs, include CMS's. (The site misnames these as "portals.") There are also reviews of open-source blogging software, photo galleries, etc.

All blogging software can be used as general CMS's, with a greater or lesser degree of difficulty. Similarly, all general CMS's can be used as blogging software, again with a greater or lesser degree of difficulty (typically with the use of free add-ons called modules, plugins, and/or extensions). So, on the site referenced above, read the user reviews of the different CMS (called "Portal") and blogging software. Each will have proponents as well as detractors.

What is a CMS? It's separating the content (articles, titles, photos) from the design of the site. A CMS makes it easy to add, delete, or edit content on a website. Typically, this is done through a word-processor like interface in a standard browser.

(What is a blog? It's a specialized CMS that arranges new blog entries in reverse chronological order, one after the other, on a website.)

Administering a CMS-based site, however, can be more or less difficult, depending upon the CMS or blogging solution chosen. "Administering" has to with setting up the look of a website (in part), establishing permissions (what members can or cannot do), choosing archiving settings, etc. Typically the person who installs CMS software gets to be the administrator.

A part of the concept of a CMS is that the look of the website is based upon a standard design template, so this is one of the big plusses of a CMS. These design templates can be custom made (by you or a professional artist), or downloaded and installed from one of the many sources for design templates on the internet. Note that it is perfectly possible for a website that is not based upon a CMS to also be based upon a design template. It's just that having such a template makes possible "content management."

The most popular CMS's include Joomla, Mambo, Drupal. Popular open-source blogging software includes WordPress and Textpattern. Here are some example sites. (I'll add to this list from time to time.)

Joomla:
http://www.firstfamilychurch.net
http://www.granitecreek.org

(How does one know? I look for clues in the source code.)

Mambo:
http://www.gleniris.net/GIBC/

Drupal:
(No examples yet.)

WordPress
http://www.htlcto.org

Textpattern
(No examples yet.)

You might instead want to choose a proprietary, rather than open-source, content management system. These are solutions you pay for. I maintain a list of more than 60 here:

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/CMS_main.php

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[esco4466]

thank you again for your help. As you have seen before (http://www.hopeworks.us) our site needs to be more user-friendly and updated. I have been experimenting with wordpress on our youth site (http://www.nrgyouth.org) by the way can anyone tell me why there is a question mark on the picture to the right on the sidebar?) ...been experimenting with a static front page and the blogs on the different pages. Obviously for the church homepage I will need more content and design. I am currently testing out a basic html page and then having blog content or wordpress static pages as the other pages linked to the html homepage.

Our server is through yahoo small business and we have a MySQL.

[mrbelfry]

by the way can anyone tell me why there is a question mark on the picture to the right on the sidebar?

I think it is because your trying to display a picture that doesn't exist. You have a line of HTML that reads:

<img border="0" src="http://www.briangardner.com/themes/activate/images/adsense.gif" width="120" height="600">

Take it out and it and the question mark should go away

[esco4466]

that did it. how can you see my code?

[tmreg]

Right click and hit "view source" or "view page source".

[David Gillaspey]

Or Command/Control + E (Explorer) or Command/Control + U (Firefox).

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[JackWolfgang]

WordPress
http://www.htlcto.org

Adding to David's list in a self-serving way, First Christian Church of Tallahassee (http://fcctlh.org) is a Wordpress site.

I'm not going into as much detail as MrBelfry, but here goes for some details of how it is done.

The site is built with a custom template of my own design. I took the WordPress default theme and started hacking.

I created two major categories which contain no posts, but do contain child categories. The categories are News and Lessons. News contains event announcements and news, and lessons contains sermon notes and audio recordings.

Lessons has two major categories: Sunday Morning Sermons and Other Lessons. Our minister preaches in series (we are just finishing a series that began in January), so I create a sub-category under Sunday Morning Sermons for each series.

News has sub-categories for each ministry, one for general news, and one for web site news.

For the static front page, I started off with Semiologic's Front Page Plugin (http://www.semiologic.com/software/static-front/), but WordPress 2.1 eliminated the need for that plugin with the Front Page options on the Reading Options page.

However, the front page isn't totally static, as I created a custom page template that displays the 5 most recent news posts and the 5 most recent lessons.

There are two static (non-WordPress pages) on the site, the When & Where page (because of the JavaScript to do the Google Map) and the Contact Page.

The plug-ins I use are:

Customizable Post Listings
Scripturizer
Search Everything (allows pages to be searched, which the standard WP search does not allow)


A few weeks ago, I trained representatives from each ministry on how to add content in the News category, and they have begun doing it. It gives the ministries ownership of how their ministry is represented, and frees me up for other work.

[Faithhb_lutheran]

To lately throw my two cents in, go with wordpress, it's a great beginners CMS, full functioning CMS packages like Joomla can catch a lot of snags, which is no problem once you learn how to deal with them, but wordpress, or any of the other blogging engines are like having training wheels on your bike, you can learn without getting a lot of cuts.

[esco4466]

Jack- However, the front page isn't totally static, as I created a custom page template that displays the 5 most recent news posts and the 5 most recent lessons.

How did you do that? I think that would work well for my site. I would like for it to be in the body.

[JackWolfgang]

However, the front page isn't totally static, as I created a custom page template that displays the 5 most recent news posts and the 5 most recent lessons.

How did you do that? I think that would work well for my site. I would like for it to be in the body.

I created a custom page template for the home page, and when I wrote the home page content, I told it to put in on that template (which is appropriately called home).

The way that I did this makes use of the Customizable Post Listings plugin (http://www.coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/) which I mentioned previously. Here is the code for the most recent 5 news postings:

<div id="News">
<h2>Recent News</h2>
<ul title="Recent News">
<?php
$wpSQL = "SELECT cat_ID ";
$wpSQL = $wpSQL . "FROM $wpdb->categories ";
$wpSQL = $wpSQL . "WHERE (category_parent = 2)";
$wpCatIDs = '';
foreach ($wpdb->get_results($wpSQL) as $Rslt) {
$wpCatIDs = $wpCatIDs . strval($Rslt->cat_ID) . ' '; }
echo "<!-- Return Recent Posts for the following categories: " . $wpCatIDs . " -->\n";
/* Params: # of Posts, Format, Categories, Sorting Parameter, Sort Order */
c2c_get_recent_posts(5, '<li><a href="%post_url%">%post_title%</a></li>',
$wpCatIDs, 'date', 'DESC');
?>
</ul>
</div>

This is retrieving all the children categories of the main news category, and then passing it as a space-delimited list to the Customizable Post Listings Plugin to return the 5 most recent news postings. The Lessons code is similar.