Need suggestions for Ministry web site
Hello,
My wife and I are marriage coordinators in our local church, and provide marriage education and marriage coaching to couples in our community.
After our site using Joomla was hacked and Drupal was recommended to us for security reasons. We are now evaluating Drupal, as well as stepping back and taking a hard look at what we want our web site to accomplish.
The functions we would like for our site are:
A place where couples that are hurting, or are looking to improve their marriage can come for help, and yet be a community where people continue to come back to.
Provide marriage/relationship resources.
Information on marriage related events in our area.
We would also like to be able to track participation and activities for class participants and couples we coach. We have looked at using CiviCRM, however after our Joomla site got hacked, we are having second thoughts. We deal with sensitive information and cannot afford to have that information be compromised. We are looking into applying for a Salesforce donation. But, we are open to suggestions for a CoRM system. We would think that a database that integrates with the website would be a good idea, but again we are open to suggestions.
Would Drupal be a good choice for our needs? What recommendations would you have for us to accomplish the functions we listed?
Thank you,
Ron Chadwick
Hi Ron, Drupal is the path
Hi Ron,
Drupal is the path you want to take : drupal is flexible and save. however this cool cms is not (yet) user friendly,... you MUST invest time to learn how to manage this overwhelming piece of software.
Once you get hooked and go for it,...well all other CMS systems will look redicoulous .
Drupal is modular and extensible ...Only your own imagination could be a limitation,...
GO FOR IT !!
john from http://www.drupalthemeplayer.com
I would go with Drupal
I was just talking with a pastor a few hours ago about a church site, and I am thinking of / planning to - use Drupal myself.
To prevent getting hacked, you might look into the permissions on the files of your site. This can depend on which user your web server runs as. Anyway, try making the permissions as reduced as possible while keeping the site useable.
Quoting your post:
"The functions we would like for our site are:
"A place where couples that are hurting, or are looking to improve their marriage can come for help, and yet be a community where people continue to come back to.
"Provide marriage/relationship resources.
"Information on marriage related events in our area."
As a community, you can have forums in which there can be people communicating with each other - posting and leaving messages, answering other messages - as we do here in this forum.
This can be something they would have to login to view, or something they could view without logging in - yet still have to login to post a comment. You can set this up the way you want.
The resources can be the content. This may include text, links to other sites, images, and embedded videos. You will not need any additional plugins to simply include the "embed" code for videos that you can get from YouTube or similar sites.
For information on events, you can have a calendar.
You can have as many accounts as you want, and provide each with various roles. The roles you can define yourself, creating the roles and assigning various permissions to each role.
Drupal
We were talking at DrupalCon about creating a module that would integrate fellowship one and Drupal. As this gets created this may be the direction you would want to look. Not really sure of the timetable of the module creation and the timetable of the needs you have.
Jesus hates data lock-in
Searching Fellowship Technologies site for the word 'export' results in 'Sorry, there are no results that match your search.'
This scares me. Especially in a declining economy, I can't recommend a proprietary, subscription-based service to my clients.
What happens when the church can no longer afford fellowship one? Can they get their records out of the system in a useful way?
I think it would be much better to invest effort in a pure-Drupal CRM solution, or improving integration between Drupal and CiviCRM.
Best,
Matt
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By all reports, Fellowship
By all reports, Fellowship One has an excellent API and supports the use of it. This would provide for exporting of data. Drupal as a ChMS has been discussed here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/15136