Building Church Websites with Drupal

session details: Building Church Websites with Drupal

• Some churches use CiviCRM, but it has some security issues
• when choosing between CiviCRM and a church management system, go with the church mgmt system
• possibility: sync Drupal/Ubercart with Fellowship1 as a backend
• http://Geeksandgod.com is a good, easy place to learn Drupal
• churches are not businesses! but many church sites look like business sites.
• churches are not nonprofits either, they are communities, not organizations
  
  • share life, not information
  • public-facing side should be a small part of the site
  • emphasize user-submitted content and interactive media
• how not to do it: list the services provided offline by the church
• how to do it: Organic Groups -- anywhere people organize physically, they can organize online
  • instead of creating <h2>s, create groups
  • even if you don't use all the features right away, OG gives you a framework to do it later
  • instantly have newsletters
  • much easier to manage!
• setup
  
  • create a "ministry" (committee) content type
  • add fields and CCK stuff -- use email field to create a contact form!
  • designate as group node
  • use taxonomy to designate type, so you can sort them
    
  • theme a teaser for each type
• multimedia sermons
  • necessary modules: CCK, filefield, Views, FFPC (FileField PodCast), SWFtools (player), GetID3
  • create content type for sermons
  • create separate file fields for MP3, MP4, and flash video
  • configure SWFtools for each media type
  • insert SWFtools codes into desired places in node.tpl.php templates
  • create a View of sermons, and add a separate feed display for each media type
  • create a sermon_series content type and add node reference to sermon type
  • use views_embed_view to embed sermon list view in sermon_series page template
• session notes: http://geeksandgod.com/files/drupalcondc.zip