Posted by nautiazn85 on April 21, 2007 at 9:37pm
We finally launched a new website for our church. It uses Drupal 5.1, and I thought you guys might be interested: http://www.kairoschurch.org
In retrospect I wish I had used CCK and Views for the whole site rather than only for parts of the website. If I have time I'll probably end up refactoring the site. Also I may do a series on my personal website ( http://www.duskintodawn.com ) on tools/tips for Drupal later this year.
Comments
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http://www.kairoschurch.org/node/27
Just out of curiosity, where did you get those icons? They look nice.
Hey I got them
Hey I got them from:
http://www.fasticon.com/comic_iphone.html
They're mimics of the new iPhone icons.
Nice mechanism for announcements
I like the way you've made the top banner into the announcements "ticker" (for lack of a better description).
How much time do you intend to spend on updating the photography and information on that? I have a hard time convincing the church administrator/intern to spend just 20 minutes each week entering in the latest announcements and events.
Andrew, I don't expect to
Andrew, I don't expect to spend more than half an hour a week updating the photography specifically. Fortunately the subtitles are actually javascript based, which means all I have to do is change a variable (string) in the script.
We have a team of photographers under our media ministries who will be passing on pictures for me to use (this is probably the most time consuming task). If the photography team doesn't have enough time on their hands, we'll probably end up using stock photos.
The "announcements" are CCK nodes that Pastors have access to. So they will actually be making the announcements, and telling me specifically which announcements/events they would like me to emphasize. Only specialized CCK nodes are allowed to be promoted to the front page. I actually hard code this in my theme in case somebody finds a way to circumvent it. I actually do a lot of these checks in my logic code in my tpl.php and template.php files.
Unfortunately it's true that finding willing hearts for this ministry is difficult. It's something we're also running into. However, a lot of people have been more anxious to volunteer their time now - especially since the website is out...
Some "Ajax" might help streamline the process too
Seems like a good opportunity for a view that renders JSON with a quick hook in the theme to pull them in on the fly:
addLoadEvent(function() {$.getJSON('/announcements/json', function(json) {
startSlideshow(json);
});
});
Then it could be generated just off a direct query of the database and updated by the pastors that already have access to setup the other promoted items.
Actually I'm doing something
Actually I'm doing something quite similar, however my approach is based on the server-side doing javascript code generation. I wrote a miniapp that uses special blocks in the theme and I'm dynamically generating code into those blocks. The dynamically generated code are attributes of a relation in the database.
JSON would've definitely worked as well. I tend to shy away from heavy usage of AJAX since I'm not comfortable programming with browser compatibility in mind.
The reason I separated the two actually had to do with the fact that the pastors didn't want to see anything more than they had to see. They didn't want to handle the photo portions, and they definitely didn't want to specify any broken links. So another group of individuals like myself produces the headline images, and we're the only one with access rights to modules that modify that portion of the database.
Great site!
Hey Minh... great job!!
just a couple of questions - is that a module you used for the rotating banner and text overlay? if so - which one! :)
also, which calendar module is that?
(I'm still kind of new to drupal - trying to learn :) )
thanks!
Rod
Rod
Rodmartin,
Rodmartin,
Thanks!
I'm actually using Jon Design's SmoothSlideShow which is available at: http://smoothslideshow.jondesign.net . It uses the MooTools libraries and he includes it with his library. It's not a plugin, and will require some type of code manipulation. Just a small note, it's a little unstable in Safari (it works about 50+% of the time).
Also I am using the Events Module, Events with Volunteers Module, and Signup Module (which is somewhat unstable at the moment. It crashed the whole site the second day the site was opened, but I've implemented some homebrew code and fixes which have stabilized it within the last 24 hours).
Good luck with your website!
Sorry!!
Hey all... sorry to hijack your post slightly but if I want to create a new post here in this group do I Create A Story?!
Sorry for asking here - I know it's not the right place but I was hoping someone might know.
On a more related note - I like your Kairoschurch site... the site I am playing with at the moment is kinda similar in layout (as are most Drupal sites!) but I was wandering if you know of any tool that would allow your top links (home... about us... ministries... etc) to be be drop down menus.
Did that make sense?! Anyone?!
Also - thanks for the links and things... I'm liking Drupal.
A.
Andy Hoyland
http://www.stjb.org.uk - St John's Church. It's not Drupal. Yet.
--
Andy Hoyland
http://www.stjb.org.uk
Try Nice Menus
Here's the link:
http://drupal.org/project/nice_menus
It may be what you're looking for. By the way, I'm not the manners police or anything, but I think your post is typical of one of the ways that Drupal isn't great: it's really hard to find out which modules enable which features. What I'm saying is that there may not be a better place to ask questions like this. If there is, I don't know about it.
Yes, use a story
If you want to ask a question or just post an announcement, use a Story. If you want to post some documentation that is more timeless that others can contribute to, use a Wiki page.
Thanks Andrew and NDRU
Thanks guys - like the nice menus... just what I needed.
And thanks for the advice on the story thing!
A.
Andy Hoyland
http://www.stjb.org.uk
--
Andy Hoyland
http://www.stjb.org.uk