Greetings everyone. I am new to drupal and I'm just starting two church websites using drupal (maybe more soon). I'd love some advice and guidance on several things. I know that a lot of you have gained much wisdom through your experiences of using drupal with churches. I'm hoping that you will share that with me so I can get these churches started out on the right foot.
Below I list the functionality (in addition to all the standard informational pages) that the churches want. Based on this...
What version should I install? Drupal? Or CivicSpace? Drupal 4.7.x or 5.x??? Part of me would love to start out with a 5.x site now so I don't have to face upgrading soon after the sites launch.
Since I have two churches now and plan to continue to add more, the Multisite functionality sounds great to me so I can easily keep the different sites up to date. Does everyone agree? Or is there an argument for separate installations? (I plan to host this on a VPS using Virtuozzo through hostmysite.com)
What modules would you recommend for the following functionality list? What is part of the core? What will need a module?
List of all Annc/News
Calendar of Events
-Volunteer Schedule (display, manage?)
-Sunday School Class Listings
Audio Sermons - Podcast, regular downloads, flash player
Pastor's Blog
Mailing List
Ability to take donations
Contact Us/Ask us a question
Image Galleries
Small Group Bible Studies/Fellowship Groups each having own pages/areas.
Any modules or functionality that I left out that you think is really important for a church? (I don't want to do too much, but would love to hear your suggestions...)
Although not a requirement for my current two churches, many I have worked with before have wanted Event Registration with option to charge or not charge money to register. Does Drupal have a good solution for that?
Thanks so much for your time,
Brad
Comments
1 List of all Annc/News 2
1 List of all Annc/News
2 Calendar of Events
3 -Volunteer Schedule (display, manage?)
4 -Sunday School Class Listings
5 Audio Sermons - Podcast, regular downloads, flash player
6 Pastor's Blog
7 Mailing List
8 Ability to take donations
9 Contact Us/Ask us a question
10 Image Galleries
11 Small Group Bible Studies/Fellowship Groups each having own pages/areas.
In order I would use:
1 CCK or Announcment
2 Views w/ Calendar for views
3 Event and Event w/ volunteer time slots tie in CCK and node reference and do nodeprofile to reference profiles from the events...may need some adjustment and trial and error here
4 Event and Calendar for views, w/ node reference to link back to home page for each class
5 Audio/CCK
6 Blog or CCK (blog already in core)
7 Email newletters? not sure what your requirements are here, and some module work may be required
8 Custom code possibly, civicCRM maybe, e-commerce possibly
9 Contact List & forms module
10 Image (may need different stuff depending on specific needs)
11 Organic Groups
This stuff is all pretty common, so there should be a version out for 5 that would be suitable for beginning development with, and given our proximity to the release of drupal 5.0 I would strongly consider starting there for development depending on your production schedule.
This sounds like a very straightforward and reasonably inclusive site reciepe for this type of organization, and sounds like a good candidate for an install profile. I'd be interested in working on this if there are others out there that would like to help refine the spec.
Hope this helps.
-Mike
A little more
Some of this depends on the time frame on when you want to launch.
7) How are you planning on doing the newsletter? Do you have a listserver that manages the email address? If so, which one? Or, are you looking at something like how drupal manages the lists? You may be interested in simplenews http://drupal.org/project/simplenews if this is the case.
8) The donations can be handled with the e-commerce module. But, this isn't ported to 5.0 yet. This might be one piece of functionality that may not be directly in 5 right away. Though, if you are using paypal there are other ways to get in on a site. Can you give some info on the type fo online donations setup you envision?
--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com - me on the web
http://www.geeksandgod.com - Geeks and God podcast
Newsletter and Donations followup
Thanks Matt for the input.
Simplenews might be what I was looking for -- I'm going to check out the module and make sure. We don't already have a listserver or anything else managing this, so I was looking for something that would handle it within drupal -- email list management and email send outs. I'd love the ability to create an HTML template for the email sendouts.
As for donations, my ideal would be for the user to enter the amount of the donation (with perhaps a line for memo where they can indicate if it is for a special ministry/need/etc. -- but perhaps not -- maybe online donations could only be for general donations) then proceed to enter their credit card information. Even better would be if they could enter their checking account information for direct debit (since I believe this incurs less fees). It would be best if this all stayed on the church website.
That said, I'd probably be willing to settle for using pay pal because my guess is that it would be the easiest thing to setup. I am not really a fan of the user experience when donating using paypal, especially for first time paypal users.
Since I'm working with multiple churches right now on their websites, I think I will recommend that if they want online donations and aren't selling anything else (books, sermons, retreat registrations, etc.) that they should opt for the simpler method (paypal?). However if they also have those other online transaction requirements I'll try out the e-commerce module.
Are there other approaches that I should be taking into consideration?
Brad
Thanks Mike for the advice.
Thanks Mike for the advice. I'm new to drupal, so it took me a while of doing research before I could even understand your answer. So far I have installed calendar, views, image, audio and simplenews. As soon as I finish posting here I'm going to install cck and organic groups.
Mike, I like your idea of an install profile. It was indeed one of my goals to do just that (once I was able). It looks like you may be moving forward with that, so I'll see if I can be helpful to you in anyway.
(If anyone cares: I decided to definitely use Drupal 5.x at this point. After researching hosting, I decided to not use hostmysite.com for drupal sites, instead I got a VPS through servint.net. Hostmysite.com has great technical support for Windows/ColdFusion. My feeling was that servint.net could provide better support for LAMP.)
Brad