Drupal Groups Churches Home

What are the costs of Drupal consulting, please?

I am building the technology budget for the coming year and want to try to include something for Drupal consulting.

We expect to receive approval to change our church name this Wednesday and so I will need to port over to the new URL and during that time update Drupal, PhP, SQL, etc.

I need someone to assist with doing the transition right and in getting several new features working, roughly in this order of priority:

Linked calendars (master & sub-ministry calendars)
Distributed web area updating by ministry leaders

I have just put together a Page for our newly forming young adults & professionals small group: http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com/node/28

This is not a "singles" group as is far too common because I don't believe that they are healthy.

This is an Intake/Welcome/Invite-a-Seeker-or-Drifter ministry which may lead to a larger culturally-relevant celebration service with spin-off groups.

That context stated I'd like to put a background or a watermark on the page to make it more interesting, either a picture of our own new Holy Grounds Coffeehouse or something generic.

From Drupal Churches Group post on InnovatingTomorrow.net:

The Drupal Churches Group has grown stale with little activity in the last several months. This group, over on groups.drupal.org, was created on a whim but grew to be in the largest 10% of groups. Now, with a large base of members it sits virtually untapped with a large pool of potential. The question is, what will become of the group?

What does management want?

In an effort to see where the groups manager was interested in taking the group I contacted him. Unfortunately, he is no longer drupaling. Not because drupal doesn't rock. Life has taken him in a different direction and we should wish him the best. But, he did allow me to become the groups manager with an intent to tap into the potential for the good of the kingdom.

What do you want?

The question remains, what will become of the group? Before I make any changes I'd like to hear from the peanut gallery. What are your suggestions? Should the purpose of the group shift? What about the groups layout and design? Should there be a logo? How about a drupal for churches distribution? Is anyone interested in hosting a churches event?

No matter how crazy you think your idea is I'm interested. Even if it's just a desire for the group and not necessarily a change.

webware.com — Culled from an initial set of over 5,000 nominations, voted on by almost 2,000,000 people, Drupal shines as a premiere platform for social publishing. Congratulations to the Drupal community for your hard work and great success.

Digg it here

This past week Innovating Tomorrow and Mustardseed Media launched a site called The Fishbowl.

Hey Everyone...
Just wanted to point out the latest series over at the Geeks & God Podcast. We're currently in the middle of a series called "forming online community" in which we're talking about building a internet based, interactive community for your church or ministry. Currently, we've got 4 episodes online with 2 episodes to go, which will release in the next 2 weeks (yielding a 6 part series)...

Of course, we talk about Organic Groups but we also cover a much wider spectrum of what it means to create an online community.

Check the series out (in reverse chronological order) at: http://geeksandgod.com/podcast-series/forming-online-community

Hope this helps some folks think about creating online community at their church!

Does anyone have any opinion on the best way to handle image uploads / display for the non-technical users who are the regular maintainers of a church website? One of the big advantages of using Drupal at our church (http://www.stthomasrichmond.org) is that the end users can maintain and add the new content. However, I've always thought that the image handling in Drupal was sub-par and our final decision was somewhat of a compromise.

To me, the choices came down to IMCE and/or the img_assist module. Here is what I think are the pro's and con's of each:

Is there a way to strongly encourage posters to include the Drupal version to which they refer in their posts?

Even better would be to also include the PHP and MySql versions as well since all three impact one another in terms of available features and performance.

I am a Drupal-in-Diapers user ... uber-newbie if you will ... and this need for Blog/Forum clarity is hardly limited to Drupal, it is a general challenge when trying to filter the relevance of technology-related discussions online.