How should I handle church ministry listings
How should I handle church ministry listings? I'm thinking taxonomies, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I would like to end up with something like this:
Ministries
|_Youth
| |_ Ministy #1
| |_ Ministy #2
|_Childern
| |_ Ministy #3
| |_ Ministy #4
|_Seniors
| |_ Ministy #5
| |_ Ministy #6
|_Etc.
I would like to have an expandable 'Ministries' menu where if Ministries is clicked, it displays all ministries OR if Youth is clicked, only youth ministries are displayed. Is this just how taxonomy works or is there some other way to handle this? Any other suggestions? Thanks for any help.
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Church Taxonomy
I set up a simple taxonomy that seems to suit our needs right now..
Ministries
|_Adults
|_Students
|_Youth
|_Children
|_Outreach
It seems most everything that we need OG to provide works with this also..
We have several sub-minitries in each Term - ie.) Adults - Men, Women, Seniors, Marrieds, College/Career, etc.. They get tagged as Adults and then a panels page displys them with a brief description.
OG also then affords us the opportunity to have an "admin" over each ministry (as we designate), as new subscribers request access (or are granted access by admin), they have ability to access portions of that particular ministries web pages that others cannot see. (ie., schedules, blogs, downloadable lessons, etc.) BTW - the signup module is also pretty convenient and provides us with some wonderful benefits as well. I recently got an error that randomnly popped up - so i have to debug that one but I hope it's something minor.
At least that's how we have it set up currently as we are just finishing and getting ready for RELEASE.
Many options
There are many ways to structure your ministry listings.
What you are describing simply sounds like pages (or perhaps a custom "ministry" content type) organized in the menu system. No need for taxonomies.
Taxonomies are for categorizing and tagging large amounts and various types of content. For example you might a taxonomy list of your ministries, then tag your news announcements, blog posts, sermons, and pictures with the ministry to which they are applicable. Then you could automatically create a list of all the content on your site that has been tagged with one particular ministry.
However there is no need to create a taxonomy just to create a hierarchical menu listing of your ministries.
Here are some approaches going from simpler to more complicated/more functional. If you don't need the extra functionality, keep it simple.
1) Each ministry is a page organized in the menu system.
2) Each ministry is a custom content type (called "ministry") where you add your own fields such as ministry leaders, age range, ministry contact info, etc. Each Ministry you create is organized in the menu system.
3) Same as step 2 but you add Taxonomy for each ministry and you automatically create a block view listing all other content related to that ministry on that ministry's page.
4) Use Organic Groups. Create a group for each ministry. Have each Ministry leader moderate each group. An example of Organic Groups is this website - groups.drupal.org. Just as "Churches" is one group on group.drupal.org, on your website each ministry would be one group.
Those are just a couple of ideas. There are many ways to do things in Drupal. Give one a try.
-Brad
Great Definition of Taxonomies, Brad
Brad, you might have just explained away the point that has been a major obstacle for me in developing a Drupal site: Getting my head around the concept of a taxonomy and how it should drive the organization of my site.
What I hear you saying is that it shouldn't. The framework of the site can be audience-focused — a main link for Youth, another for Adults, one (fairly inconspicuous one) for Committees, one (perhaps with the link text of "Welcome") for people new to the church, one called Sermons for everyone who wants to see what's coming up or listen to what's already happened — and the taxonomy can be a web behind that framework that weaves related content together. So I can actually build the site with the idea in mind of providing a link for each key audience to get to its content and then develop a system of keywords — the tags for the taxonomy — over time to improve the grouping of interrelated content.
Is that close to the mark?
-Cliff
Information Architecture and technical implementation
There are two questions. 1) What's the best way to organize this content so that users can find the information they need? 2) How can I do that in Drupal?
You should spend a long time thinking and researching the best way to categorize and present the information. It should definitely be done from the perspective of the audience and their needs. Content doesn't have to be organized by audience type, however. It can be organized by topic or task too. In some cases it might be better to organize the content geographically (fellowship groups), chronologically (upcoming events), or alphabetically (staff directory). In the end you need to come up with a top down hierarchy that will be quickly understandable by your audience and enable them to easily find the information they are looking for or complete the task they need to do.
This top down hierarchy is best implemented as a primary menu in Drupal - the main navigation on the website.
Then, yes, as you describe, you can create a secondary system of navigation and grouping of content utilizing taxonomy. Create keywords that you can put on blogs and sermons to describe their content and link to similar blogs/sermons.
Also, keep in mind that you don't need to use the taxonomy system at all. For some sites, especially smaller, simpler ones, it may be too much classification.
-Brad
Content seperation and ownership
Hello Brad,
I appreciate your involvement in the blogs posted here to help others understand how to use Drupal.... I have been following a couple of threads to try to understand how to implement Drupal in a fashion that allows our church to have many authors with each having a different ministry (A web page) to update. Currently, I have created a number of PAGES such as Children_Ministry, Mens_Ministry, Womens_Ministry, Teen_Ministry, Spanish_Ministry, Missions, Resources. All of which are pages with at least one person to provide authorship of the content.
What I would like to be able to do is to assign rights to one person for the Resources PAGE (for example) while not having the same rights given to the person to all the other pages (e.g.Children_Ministry PAGE).
Any insight on the mechanism to establish this type of behavior would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Von
Nodeaccess
The nodeaccess module ( http://drupal.org/project/nodeaccess ) will allow you to assign rights for editing a node by user or role.
Options
I haven't used it but the Nodeaccess module that bdornbush recommended seems to be exactly what you are looking for... but a couple of other options:
1) Don't do it. Don't restrict access to this level of granularity. Let everyone approved to edit content edit any page. If you trust these people with your children and with spiritually shepherding your congregation... are you really worried they will deface other sections of the website? They'll know what they should and shouldn't update. The main problem that I run into is not having enough people interested in keeping things up-to-date... I don't want to put up any more barriers to making that happen. Also, managing complicated permissions will become another administrative task that somebody will have to take on. Just make sure you really need it.
2) Organic Groups. - You can create each ministry as a group and make each ministry leader the owner of their group. This gives the leader the ability to manage their own page plus a bunch of other functionality. (This group here is an organic group...)
-Brad
Recommendation on Private Information and pub approval
Thank you Brad and bdornbush
Just to follow up - another one of our requirements is to be able to implement two different private views of information
One is to share private information such as church meeting notes, meeting outlines, ministry plans and financials.
The other is to share prayer request only to our prayer ministry team where the prayer requests tend to be private in nature.
I have been playing with permissions for blocks on a node and found that I can identify who is able to see the block by assigning the users to the block. This seems to do what I am looking for, but wanted to ask if there are other options that should be considered?
Brad - you bring up a good point on the organic and if I step back at the larger picture - what I would like to do is to have a few people that could approve for publication any content that is created... I'm not looking for control so much as insuring we are moving in the same direction in our mission and we are not unintentional publishing content that should not be (one example is children's pictures without the approval of the parent). Can someone recommend how to setup an approval framework for publishes content for specific nodes that has changed (e.g. page) while other nodes are free flowing without an approval (e.g. forum)?
Thank you for your guidance,
Von
Expandable
You mentioned wanting each ministry to expand when clicked. You might try http://drupal.org/project/collapse_text. Could be used on a simple page layout listing ministries and descriptions. I've also used http://drupal.org/project/quicktabs in conjunction with ministry display.