We are looking at upgrading our basic html website (http://www.johnstownascension.org/) to allow for easier content creation/editing along with new features (like event calendar). We could start with D6 or D7 and spend a lot (?) of time using off the shelf modules to get the features we want but I don't want to reinvent the wheel for basic functionality. At first glance the feature list for OpenChurch looks interesting and similar to what we would like to do. It is not clear how much support the distribution has outside of the group who built the initial version - so continued support/updates is a concern.
Are there many folks out there using that distribution? I would be interested in some feedback on how easy it is to install/customize and related comments.
Regards, David
Comments
Hi Cyberhiker I'm part of a
Hi Cyberhiker
I'm part of a new company called The Tribes Online and I'm working with 2 other programmers, rlmumford and andrewbelcher. We're hoping to eventually provide a Software as a Service product to churches based off drupal that is similar to products such as Church Insight.
In all honesty I do not feel OpenChurch is quite there yet. However there are plans to upgrade OpenChurch to drupal 7. We want to do this as soon as possible but unfortunately we're not able to help out much until september. However Jay (Its creator) is very much wanting to do this upgrade and appears to be very much involved in it. Its my plan to be heavily involved with Open Church but I really need to focus on performance and even more importantly, usability if I am to use it as a basis for a Software as a Service. So we plan to involved either in Open Church, or something similar to it but we do not currently use it for any of the church websites look after (as we using Drupal 7).
Our plan is to commit to this for at least a year. So in terms of updates or support, we'll definitely be around for a year and longer if we manage to financially sustain ourselves. Also Jay shows no signs of dropping out any time soon.
In terms of customising it, the only issue we've found is its extensive use of panels. This is largely due to our lack of understanding of panels and so it might be entirely our fault! However it is pretty good and so well worth trying. If you run into any issues I'd be very interested in hearing what they are because, as I said, usability is a key issue for the people we will eventually be working with.
What kind of time frame do you have? Are you able to wait for the Drupal 7 version?
What kind of time frame do
I'm hoping to get a prototype together in the next month or so.... the timeframe after that will depend on reviews/comments by various leaders and how stable I find the distro to be.
Update
OK - I've taken the distro and put up a demo version at
http://www.johnstownascension.org/openchurchhttp://www.johnstownascension.org with some of our information. I updated some out-of-date modules and fixed a couple of little items - mostly views that didn't look quite right (at least for how I need it to look). I have not touched the colors/theming - I'll experiment with that a bit more later. Take a look and let me know if you have any suggestions.Edit: Correct name now that site has gone live.
Ok - We're now live... I
Ok - We're now live... I made tweaks here and there in areas like views that didn't seem to work quite right for me - for instance on the media page the photo gallery sorted in chronological order... Generally I would expect it to sort so the newest content was at the top so I edited the sort to be descending instead of ascending. The rest was similar - small stuff just to make it work a little better for my use case.
I updated almost all the modules to their latest stable versions, except the view_slideshow module - the 3.0 version broke the homepage rotator so I went back to the 2.3 version.
Doesn't seem like OpenChurch itself has been updated recently except for the theme.