Drupal Groups Churches Home

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.

Welcome

Welcome to the Drupal churches group. This is a group centered around building Church websites with Drupal and a point for members of The Church to go out into the Drupal community. In this group we discuss how to use Drupal, modules to use, integrating other services with Drupal, and the ins and outs of building Church websites.

The Drupal church community extends beyond this group. You can find more information and help in the IRC channel #drupal-churches on irc.freenode.org and on the Geeks and God podcast website.

BamaJohn's picture

Moved our church to Drupal

Hello folks - I posted a while back about hosting providers and when https://www.siteground.com/ offered existing users a new site for $9.95 for the 1st year I pulled the trigger. I have used them for my personal/sandbox account and had been satisfied. If anyone is interested I can send a link for the special offer.

http://www.montevallofbc.com/ is the site and I would appreciate any suggestions or ideas. It has just gone live so not much content - I hope some of the leaders will contribute better content, but they did not with the old site... I especially would appreciate a theme recommendation that you like for churches.

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MarlonRibunal's picture

Theming Using Panel & Mini Panel

I am trying to customize acquia slate. What is the best way to achieve a desired design? I really know nothing about designing (except for few fundamental concepts).

I am trying to accomplish this: http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=af22e4a4a6e062a2...

Can this be done with Panel & Mini Panels alone? If not how difficult it is to customize the template? Do I really need to go down the base code of the template and do the dirty stuff?

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flickerfly's picture

Sermon Feature

I've been messing around with the Feature module created by Development Seed for Drupal and have gotten pretty excited about it. As a result, I've released a Drupal Feature called sermon. It does what you might expect, puts together a Sermon feature to add to your drupal website. It includes all sorts of neat little bits that I'll be able to use next time I stand up a Drupal church website. I put up three this year so have had the opportunity to play with this.

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anonamos's picture

How do YOU integrate Ministries into your site?

What's your Drupal recipe for Ministries?

How do you send out your Small Group emails/newsletters each week?

I want our weekly emails to be sent out to our small group members AND posted on our website's front page as a News item.

I've managed to ALMOST accomplish this, but I'm not sure if I'm going the right direction… or whether CiviCRM would solve all my problems, instead.

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Branjawn's picture

Anyone use Messaging and Notifications successfully?

So, I've given myself (and spared you) three days to try and get this to work. Didn't happen.

I created a Custom Subscription (Node Type: Announcement) and cannot get it to send email OR queue. I can subscribe to content types, like Page, Story, etc. I have a custom content type, Announcement, that I want people to be able to subscribe to. Any ideas of why this isn't working or what I can do to troubleshoot?

Like I said, I've spent three days reading threads, tinkering, checking this and unchecking that, nada. Oh, and this framework doesn't provide much in the way of log entries :\

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domineaux's picture

prayer requests

I been working on a faith site and prayer requests is a big issue.
So, I thought to share and ask for some feedback or suggestions.
I've created a content type = prayer request
It is just a basic story content type using CCK field types
I've changed the titles of course to help users know what to do.
CCK module is needed to build other fields for personal information.
This is not on a production site yet.

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Branjawn's picture

Notifications / Newsletter / Non-users

I can't seem to think this thru all the way, so I'm looking for some input from the community.

Our church currently uses a raw email list to send emails (ranging from daily announcements, which i find very annoying, to monthly newsletter). How can I incorporate these emails, subscribe them to newsletters, announcements, etc, without them being active users? Many of them will never access the website.

The most dirty solution is to import the emails, create users, subscribe them en masse.

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Branjawn's picture

Something I learned today

While theming and developing today I switched from Firefox to Internet Explorer and found that my site had no styles! Ahhh! To save you from possible headaches, here's my finding: IE limits Drupal to 31 stylesheets total. The work-around for the bug is to enable CSS aggregation.

Many modules have their own stylesheets, so when you get to a certain number of modules, plus have your own custom theme, you reach a point like I did today where you pass the threshold. Hope this helps someone!!

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philbar's picture

RealName and Church Websites

As some of you have already gathered, I'm developing a Drupal distribution for church websites.

One of the early decisions I would like to make is whether to require users of church websites to use their real name. I feel usernames give a false sense of being anonymous and have a tendency to encourages internet flame wars or otherwise cause people to act less composed then when they use their real names. In addition, church websites should be extensions of their physical communities and real names help easily associate virtual users with their physical counterpart.

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philbar's picture

Which features should be first in Drupal for Churches?

Sermon Podcast
15% (6 votes)
Staff Directory
0% (0 votes)
Donations (Online Tithing)
3% (1 vote)
Pastor Blog
5% (2 votes)
Ministry Groups (OG)
18% (7 votes)
Prayer Board
0% (0 votes)
Events and Calendar
60% (24 votes)
Total votes: 40
Branjawn's picture

Need to Vent

Instead of actually accomplishing things the past week I've been trying to debug... Drupal, my install, MySQL. I literally spend ALL day working (not for pay) on this.

Cron will not run. It fails indefinitely.
I finally got one install (I duplicated my site on another server, with the same error) to work by uninstalling getID module. So I go to the other install and do the same thing, nothing.

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BamaJohn's picture

Hosting Providers or Recommendations?

I did a search but if I missed a post, list, or such, a link is appreciated...

I gained Drupal experience on sites for my professional association (www.nena.org and www.al911.org) and I want to move our Church site to Drupal. I'm struggling to find a host in our price range as we are a very small church and money is tight. We use Slicehost for NENA but $20 a month is not in our price range. I may make hosting part of my financial support of the church and just go that route but I prefer something with Cpanel so it would be easier for someone else to take over if needed.

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mikesimmons's picture

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.

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jggarley's picture

Drupaler Needed for Church Website

My church pastor recently approached me about the need to expand the church ministry through the Internet. He wants to reach out to people through the internet (streaming online sermon, podcast, etc...). He wants a dynamic multimedia church website. He has asked me to come up with a price quote and also he needs it ASAP. I know very well that Drupal will be the best choice for such project considering the requirements listed below. I'm a newbabe when it comes to Drupal. Here is the Deal!

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briansea's picture

NETBibleTagger now has a Drupal module

Bible.org has made a module to easily add the NETBibleTagger (http://labs.bible.org/NETBibleTagger) javascript to the footer of each page on a drupal site. And, it allows you to customize the popup behaviour from the Site Config menu. It is currently being used on bible.org and numerous other ministry sites.

You can find the page on the module here: http://labs.bible.org/blog/netbibletagger_drupal_module

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domineaux's picture

Letter writing from website printed out and sent by regular mail (not email) seeking a module

Currently working on a christian site.

Not sure if there is a module or workaround for this.

A module that will allow users to work with the database of specified users (roles,groups,etc) and create printable formatted letters on the website.

Once the letters are printed the user hand addresses envelopes and mails, via snailmail letters to the recipent/s of the letter.

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Drupal Distribution for Churches

A Drupal Distribution for Churches has been a long time coming. There has been plenty of discussion threads and podcasts regarding this topic.

This page exists for planning purposes. You can add feature suggestions, tutorial links, module suggestions by editing this page directly. From this information a Installation Profile will begin to emerge with the most basic features first and more advance features in the future.

Features should be listed by priority. The most important features should be a the top and the less important features (things most churches could survive without) should be at the bottom.

Current Drupal distibutions available as install profiles are Churches (recently deprecated) and OpenChurch.

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keithm_home's picture

New Here - Found Survey on CMS

Hi all, new here, although I've managed and modified a drupal site in the past (no longer active,) this is the first time I've thought of joining any group project here. I've got 23 years development experience for various business applications, with quality assurance, and project management thrown in. I'm our churches Vision Planning Team, which is what actually led me her.

I found a book at Barnes & Noble on church development, so I bought it. The gal at the checkout counter suggested I take a look at geeks and god. And they have their webcast about the drupal church distribution.

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arcaneadam's picture

Twitter?

Just posted the same thing in my local area group(NC), but thought I'd ask here also. How many of you are on twitter. I imagine a good bit of you are. I know I am following some of you already, but this would be a good place to post your twitter and get some twommunity going. I'll go first:

@adamgregory

Let the following of tweets begin!

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skor's picture

On what kind of server do you run your site run?

Shared host
57% (16 votes)
VPS
21% (6 votes)
Dedicated Single Server
11% (3 votes)
Multiple Physical servers (either load balanced, or separate web/file/db servers)
4% (1 vote)
Cloud Servers
7% (2 votes)
Total votes: 28
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