How-To

Does anyone have a good way to track metrics like attendance, baptisms, etc.?

Our church has an active ministry to deliver meals to ill people, and to provide rides. Currently, it is all manual, that is, the coordinator contacts people by phone or email, and logs their responses on paper. It's manually intensive. the coordinator was talking with a relative who said that her church used a wiki to manage this. She called me, the webmaster, to see what I could do to support this need using the web site.

The requirements are:

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I'm trying to use Drupal V6 to create an online directory (user list) of church members with pictures, contact info, interests, etc. Membership security access is required to view this info. This is pretty easy when I've got an email address to go with each member. But I'd like to include those in the listing that aren't on the net, for the benefit of the other members. Has anyone dealt with this issue, and how did you solve it? The problem revolves around Drupal requiring a unique email address for all users.

I had to add an online donation page to our website recently, and didn't have a lot of time to do it. Instead of trying to learn Ubercart, I thought I would just write the bare minimum that we needed to get going. I had some experience with authorize.net from a project a I did about 6 years ago, and thought what we wanted would be very simple. Alas, Authorize.net had changed things around a bit and my solution didn't turn out quite as nice as I had hoped (It takes 2 pages before you get to Authorize.net).

What have you come up with for repeating dates and calendar management as a whole?
We used CCK+DateField+Calendar for a long time, but eventually changed to simply embed a Google Calendar on our site instead.

http://www.gracecommunity.ws/event

The biggest hurdle I think is the general interface for working with the calendar.

GCal: click on the date/time you want to add something and start typing,

Drupal:
- remember where the Add Event link is
- figure out what fields to fill in
- remember to select the date and time (with the correct time zone)

I wast just noticing the hCard module, http://drupal.org/project/hcard, and was wondering what the rest of you use for your church sites to cater to search engine interests. hCard seems like it may be a step in the right direction. I know PathAuto can be helpful in this. What other tips might you share?

Rob_Feature has put up a potential session for drupalCon DC (in March in Washington DC) on building church websites with Drupal. If you're going to be at DrupalCon, consider registering and voting for the session.

http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/building-church-websites-drupal

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.