Posted by dmullens on April 17, 2012 at 12:46am
Hi All,
Just purchased a new account for our church. For years I've been hosting our church website on my personal account.
Anyway, I installed OpenChurch and now have it setup (default setup) and have a question. I notice in OpenChurch there isn't a 'story' content type. Right now we are on a Drupal 6 implementation. We put our newletter on the website and use the story content type. I have two things I was hoping to do:
1) Continue to use "story" to do the newsletter articles and
2) have an easy way to export the data in our old site and import it into the new site.
Any suggestions?
Comments
What is the address for your
What is the address for your website? Are you saying your existing site is Drupal 6? Did you download the Drupal 7 version of OpenChurch?
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address
Right now the address is: http://173.254.28.25/~njumccom. Our current website is at: http://www.njumc.com
Yes I downloaded the current version of OpenChurch (version 7 beta 1 I believe).
Simple News Module
I built a site for our church in Drupal Gardens. Recently our church eliminated the printed newsletter. We still needed a way to get content to people who didn't use computers. I used taxonomy to tag content, from various content types, to be news letter material. I then use a view to list the content. I am working on an RSS feed to auto-generate an email digest. Mail Chimp supports RSS generated email. It's very basic and still a work in progress.
The SimpleNews modules seem to take this approach to a much higher level. Drupal Gardens does not allow adding modules. Has anyone tried to use SimpleNews with Open Church?
http://www.fumcbocaraton.org
http://www.fumcbocaraton.org/open-steeple-newsletter
We use Constant Contact
We are using Constant Contact for our newsletter, but archiving the stories on the website. We had been using the "story" content for this, but that isn't an option in OpenChurch. Right now I think we would have to use "Blog."
Similar!
Wow, your note was freaky to me. I am webmaster for FUMC of Santa Rosa, CA, and we use Drupal 6. We are looking at the newsletter and how to change since we lost a staff person who did the now printed version using MS Publisher. The church is open to looking at new ways to do things as long as we still offer a printed version. I would be very interested in your progress in producing a printed version from the online version, SimpleNews or other.
I think many church's are in
I think many church's are in a similar place. I believe that all church content should originate on the website and filter out from there. The website should be the place of record. That said, our church is not there yet. We still have a staff person who assembles the weekly email and bulletins. We could save a few hours a week if we generated an automatic email.
By the way, there was a huge anxiety when we eliminated the printed newsletter. A month later, it was barely missed. One of the staff just prints the content from the website and makes some copies for 50 or so people.
Ya we can probably add an app
Ya we can probably add an app for a newsletter, not sure if I should enable it by default. Simplenews is pretty good.
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Adding OpenChurch SimpleNews
Adding OpenChurch SimpleNews to 1.11 roadmap - http://drupal.org/node/1489956. Even without an app it is still easy to install. If you download and enable the module you're halfway there. You get a block for user signups and a default content type that can be you main newsletter. It's very easy to set up.
At some point I might add apps for other SaaS newsletters like mailchimp, constant contact, etc. - I haven't decided yet. I will start with SimpleNews since it is free and a lot of people will just want something basic.
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Yo, We're looking into
Yo,
We're looking into Newletter stuff at the moment. We might be able to build it. I've got someone doing some research into it at the moment.
I'm trying to figure out if I think we prefer something like an intergration with php-list or at least an optional integration (So maybe integrate simplenews wiht php-list). Php-list handles bounces and sends e-mails in batches and so will scale for large lists much better then simplenews... I think, haven't done definitive research.
I've done the research on Simplenews
Hey, this is Brian from ModulesUnraveled.com
I just thought I'd throw this out there, I have a video series on newsletters (using Simplenews) coming out in less than a week. Simplenews will send in batches, by the way. You have control over the size of the batch, and how often they are sent.
The series will cost $30, but you can pre-order for $15 right now. (Totally worth it since it can/will take weeks to figure out everything that I teach, on your own.)
20 part series, covers everything from setup to plain text and HTML newsletters to theming.
If you're interested, you can check it out on the pre-order page
SimpleNew Is the Way to Go
I also think SimpleNews is the way to go. Just as easy as creating any other piece of content. A nice module.
@bjlewis2: Thanks for sharing that. I will look into it for my customers that I am currently moving to Drupal.
I am working on a simplenews feature
See: http://drupal.org/node/1544098
It isn't going to be very complicated, just pre-initializing for ppl and theming the newsletter subscribe block in the right sidebar. I have a working version in 2x dev. You can follow that thread to watch progress.
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It's an app now on the
It's an app now on the OpenChurch apps page. You can see a screenshot here: http://twitpic.com/9dj46u - I should have taken a screenshot logged out where it shows a signup box.
Still need to do some more testing. Just keeping things real basic. It adds the subscribe block to the sidebar and themes it for you. Other than that I changed a couple minor settings on the default simplenews newsletter content type and enabled anonymous subscribers by default. I want to keep things pretty simple, it's meant to just get people up and running pretty quick.
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