Discussion

I have just been reading about the recently announced Acquia Drupal https://acquia.com/product-matrix

Based on their product matrix it sounds as though one may download Drupal 6.5 with most of the commonly desired modules - well tested - plus some additional custom Acquia features for free with user forum only support.

Could this be the answer that many churches are seeking to bypass the setup hassle and guesswork that a module will or will not work?

Come join us for a totally free Drupal 6 theming workshop. This casual training will walk through building a Drupal 6 theme from scratch, start to finish.

Your group leader will be building a basic theme for a company website based off a Photoshop mockup. He will build the theme and talk about what he's doing and why he's doing it. You can ask basic questions along the way but, due to the compressed timeline of the workshop, we won't stop the workflow to answer anything extremely complex (or go off in directions that don't pertain to the theme being built).

Come out and join us! Questions? Contact the organizer here.

• Signup: Please signup if you plan to attend by clicking the signup button at the bottom of this event listing or contacting the organizer
• Where?
  St. Matthew Lutheran Church
  2040 South Commerce
  Walled Lake, MI
  Room 304 (use rear entrance)
  Google Map
• Date: Saturday, October 11, 2008
• Time: 1pm-6pm

We aren't providing any food/snacks, etc so bring your own. We will have wireless assuming everything goes as planned. However, we cannot promise that the wireless will be functioning.

Hope to see you there!

I've recently come across the storm module. I'm exploring the ability to build a work group collaboration tool around this module along with the use of a variety of other tools. In a non-church effort, I've been researching all sorts of collaboration and project managment web services such as Basecamp, CentralDesktop, ACE, Sharepoint and some more. They've all had their issues in one area or another.

The flexibility of Drupal combined with storm may be able to bring us closer than any other options.

Online groups are quickly becoming a staple of church sites. Some churches are using CMS, like drupal and the organic groups module, to build their groups while others use sites like Church Community Builder to manage their members and provide online groups.

Looking at how some of these groups are setup I notice a number of differences in information architecture. Some of the different IAs are fairly good and meet the needs to of the average user. Others suffer from missing features or are difficult for the average user to find what they are looking for.

I was thinking about using Drupal for a highly customized Personnel database and thought it sounded similar to a Church Management Software in some way. Has anyone explored using Drupal as a Church Management Software? With CCK and Views what it is, the ability to customize has become rather broad and may be able to handle something of this magnitude. I know some use a CCK/Views ability to manage projects elsewhere and I started the personnel database discussion on the Consulting and Business group.

Using the Related Links from the Links module (Drupal 5), I'm running into limitations. These are alredy established nodes, and I'm trying to fix the broken links. The new links are longer than the old ones, and Drupal won't let me make the links longer. Can anyone explain what's going on here, or how to work around it?

Hi, I'm looking to add some admin-supplied video and can not get it to playback smoothly. I don't know much at all about video, so please excuse my awkward terminology and foolish assumptions.

The Drupal:
• 6.4
• JW FLV Media Player 4.1
• Via Filefield + jQuery

The Media:
• High-quality DVD Video
• Half a dozen vids + a dozen audio tracks
• Length is about 4 minutes each

The Encoding:

I need some help running from all our custom stuff to the strength and flexibility that Drupal provides. :-)

This is a one-time job for a 501c3 non-profit. I expect it is pretty simple for someone who knows their way around Drupal 6 module development. We have a PHP script that handles the distribution of a certain report individually to our people worldwide. Each person gets a custom version of the report. The report is uploaded to the server from this end with a predictable name that also identifies the user through a private key stored in the database and associated with the user. No user should be able to see any other users reports with the exception for users of a certain role. (This would be an enhancement of the current script.) Also, no user should be able to do anything, but view these reports. The ideal solution would provide the files through CCK Filefield so that I can create views on these reports as seems appropriate at the time and can integrate them into views that include other files.

Greetings-

We have a need to come up with a Journal module for Drupal 5.x. I thought to start with Blog from the Drupal Core and adjust that to come up with Journal.

The trouble comes that Blog is very public, whereas Journal needs to be private on a per user basis, with possibly admin oversight. (I envision a check box on the "Access control" to enable this "root capabilities" mode.)

I keep trying suggestions, and always it seems when the suggestions do not work, then the last resort suggestion of installing one of the Access Control modules (TAC or TAC Lite) comes up.

We've talked about something Twitter-style for specialized purposes like prayer requests or a church-specific group. Anyone been using the TWiT Army app? Leo talked about it on the latest TWiT. http://army.twit.tv for a demonstration. http://laconi.ca/trac/ for the project site. I haven't used it, but I'm thinking what a great way to stay in touch with people from your church throughout the week.

I am the Worship Leader / Technology geek at a mid-sized church, and recently put up a site on bluehost.com running Drupal.

http://www.heritageauburn.com

Any constructive comments would be great. It is a work in progress as we have yet to add any real content and it is basically a header page.

The default rotating images I am currently using from the nitobe theme will eventually be replaced with our own panoramic / stitched images.

A Brother in Christ,

Aaron G.

Anyone who is offering a link for PayPal donations can probably answer this question.

What type of PayPal account should we set up for our church?

Personal, Business, or is there one specific to non-profits?

Thanks!

We are building a site for a church. However, we need a consistent set of icons that is church-related. I can find icons with houses, people (for activities), but no one that are specific church-related.

Does anyone here know a good place to get some graphic stuff for churches?

So you've heard that you should use Drupal for your church website, but you're not really sure to begin. You look at the Drupal website, and you see all kinds of download choices, with modules and themes, and you're trying to wrap your head around all of these concepts, but it just isn't quite clicking for you. What you need is a simple analogy for how all of these pieces work together.

The other day, Bob Christenson posted a question on Twitter about development versions of modules.

Anyone know of a way to track new official #drupal releases(not hackish, unusable dev versions). The problem is, not all dev versions are bad

Since the question affects a lot of topics we've been discussing in the Churches Group, including conversations about building install profiles, I've decided to write about it here.

I haven't done this myself yet so I shant comment. In trying to figure out what sort of questions a church new to using drupal might ask, I happened on this one. "How do you do a sermon podcast?"

Perhaps those actually doing this could share their version of drupal, the modules they depend on and any other tip that might be appropriate in helping others complete this task. This will help us build up resources for others to get started. It might even be a good start towards the case studies we'd like to build up or be something we could start formatting into a wiki page.

It's time for the Churches group to have a solid homepage. ebrittwebb started the move towards using panels to display the groups information, posts, polls, and other stuff in ways that aren't just a river of news. I'd like to take this a step further and incorporate the types of things you, the groups users, use along with what would be good for potential new people to the group. So please, let me know what types of information you'd like to see at a glance and what types of information you think would be good for new comers. Making this group as usable as possible will be important in making this group as useful as possible.

I'm pulling mfer's comment out of a discussion to start a new one so it doesn't get lost. (I think part of the answer is us answering the question!)

Recently a LOT of our church members (adults and teens) have discovered facebook and there has been a growing community and interaction growing there (one of our pastors had a 40th anniversary party organized via facebook).

I have finally found some time to start mulling over what role our church website would have in relation to all of this activity on facebook.

Do you have any ideas or experience in using your church website to complement facebook (not replace it, no need to re-invent a perfectly well working wheel)?

What are the costs of Drupal consulting, please?

I am building the technology budget for the coming year and want to try to include something for Drupal consulting.

We expect to receive approval to change our church name this Wednesday and so I will need to port over to the new URL and during that time update Drupal, PhP, SQL, etc.

I need someone to assist with doing the transition right and in getting several new features working, roughly in this order of priority:

Linked calendars (master & sub-ministry calendars)
Distributed web area updating by ministry leaders