church

Hi everyone,

I was just wondering, what hosting do you use for your Drupal church installations? Our pastor wants us to stay away from GoDaddy because of their questionable advertising in the past.

So, what hosting services are you using? Are you happy with them? Are there any that you have had bad experiences with and want to stay away from?

Thanks!

• Cy

Site: http://freedomvalleytulsa.com
Site designer: Ament Creative LLC @ http://amentcreative.com

This was a site that I did for free for a church plant in Tulsa. They gave me a jpg of what they wanted the site to look like and we went from there. Some of the features of the site include:
1. Podcast (Views, FileField Podcast, CCK)
2. Embedded media from YouTube and Vimeo (Embed Module)
3. Easy content editing (WYSIWYG and FCKEditor)
4. Staff Page (CCK and Views)
5. Contact Forms (Webform)

Site: http://thediscipleshipdare.com
Site designer: Ament Creative LLC @ http://amentcreative.com

This is a site that I just launched for Jess Bousa author of The Discipleship Dare. It's the first CMS site that he has ever used. Needless to say, he is very pleased with drupal.
Some of the features that the client wanted are:
1. Rotating header with endorsements. (Views Rotator Module)
2. Free access to the book online with a free account. (Taxonomy Access Control)
3. Easy content editing (WYSIWYG and FCKEditor)
4. Send to a friend (Spread Module)
5. Contact Forms (Webform)

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.

This is the official first step to a future get together where we'll discuss how to more effectively use Organic Groups for interactive ministry groups on a church website.

I've changed churches and the church we joined was in the midst of a transition to a new web site platform and I helped them finish the move to Drupal. Here's the site:

http://gracebchurch.org

The design is by the music pastor's wife and the functionality is still a work in progress, but quite an improvement over the previous static site.

It seems the variety of options to create some sort of distro or feature set or pattern or template or whatever are broad, but one thing that is united under all of them is the need to collect a list of what sort of features should be included in this. So what features do you think every or most church websites should have. Let's stay away from modules, how it would be accomplished.

This is a question about defining the problem. We can figure out how to solve it later.

I'm trying to get some feed back from the community so that we can develop a solid event registration system for churches. What are your event registration needs? Below is a brain dump of specifications that I have come up with. Comments? Suggestions? Other requirements? Do you want to highlight the most important/least important things from the list for your church?

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?

I'm pulling mfer's comment out of a discussion to start a new one so it doesn't get lost. (I think part of the answer is us answering the question!)