Help with church website e.g. managing info, pre-populated forms

stieglitz - November 26, 2008 - 21:07

I could not figure out the best place to post this. It may fall best under support. If this is the case please let me know. I have been using Drupal for about 8 months now and have been challenged to redesign my church website. I am hoping that someone can help give me some approaches to the desired site needs.

The church has a small group ministry with 1 pastor who oversees a group of "mentors". Each Mentor oversees "Shepherds/Apprentice Shepherds" who lead the group until it gets to a size where the group becomes two groups. Each of the people needs to submit reports (mentor, shepherd, and app. shepherd).

The challenge:

1. How to manage the groups
a. when there is changes in leadership or membership

2. How to build a report that will automatically populate for example when a shepherd fills out a report for his/her group, the members of that group should automatically appear.

It has been requested that the reports be of a GUI nature and I have no idea how to approach this. I can not tell you how appreciative I will be for any help or direction you might give me.

Thank you in advance,

Jon

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WebForm

setfree - November 26, 2008 - 23:20

Check out the WebForm module. It is very flexible and sounds like it should be able to do what you need.

Complete Computer Care

Daunting Challenge: CCK? webform? Pre-populated fields!

stieglitz - November 27, 2008 - 05:29

I believe webform will not work because I will need to use views to assimilate the data received from the numerous forms entered. It seems the best option is to build the forms with CCK. My question then is how to use CCK in a GUI fashion with pre-populated fields dependant on the unique user filling out the form. This seems like a daunting challenge!

Not sure

setfree - November 27, 2008 - 15:27

I'm not sure if I can help, but perhaps a more detailed explanation of your requirements/plans would help.

Will the leaders and/or members be users with accounts in the site?
How many of members and leaders of each group?
Will the pre-filled data be a simple list or and area for the leader to comment on each member?
Perhaps generally describe the entire, overall workflow and report/form details...

Maybe I, or someone else, can help.

Church website help

stieglitz - November 28, 2008 - 04:53

Thank you setfree,

I am in the process of "using" OG as a means of managing the groups(I am not sure how to configure it totally yet). I am sure there will be a number of people who will choose to continue working with their small groups the traditional way of "paper reports" but all leaders will be encouraged to use the website to submit reports and those that do not will have their reports entered into the CMS so that summary reports may be generated (ala views with privileged access I suppose-haven't got to that point yet). Currently 5 people manage roughly 5 groups each with each group having anywhere from 4-12 people per group. I plan on each group manager(shepherd) being administrator of their group of 12 people and each mentor being administrator of the 5 group managers(and subsequent groups)

The reports are primarily the same every week for such fields as those in attendance (variation may occur when someone new visits or due to absenteeism) So I am thinking the names of the (suppose the last report submitted by user) attendees would show up on the list if nothing has changed they could continue on to the next section of the report that might be for comments. Also the reports have to be submitted by a certain day but I would like for someone to be able to come to the site, fill out a section of the report and allow the person to come back at a later time to fill out the rest of the report, with the previous work saved, and submit it.

Then I will have to come up with a way of enabling the Small Group Pastor to be able to generate reports for such things as overall attendance, who has not turned in reports, who is not currently in a group from the total membership, etc. and be able to print these out in a nice looking format or even excel.

I know this seems like a tall order but I am certain drupal is capable of all this. Thank you for any help you or anyone else may be able to offer.

Jon

I've pondered it a little

setfree - November 28, 2008 - 16:01

I've pondered it a little bit and from my knowledge it seems webform may still be the best bet. The biggest issue is going to be getting the lists of members into the form.

Some options may be to:

Use a hyper link for the submitting user to click to open the form. From the hyperlink you could form a string of members to pass to the form through the URL. The you can grab the values from the URL to fill in a selection list or other fields. I have done something simliar to this in a recent church ministry site.
Populate values into the users profiles and then the profile values will be available to the webform ( %profile[profile_fullname] )

I know these are some vague concepts but maybe something to help get started. Also, WebForm can be very powerful for reporting and using time restricted submitting rules. I have had to do these things recently, but with custom modules/code to interact with WebForm.

Hope this helps somewhat.

Thanks

stieglitz - November 29, 2008 - 12:22

Setfree,

Those are some very helpful tips which I had not considered. I appreciate that and will try to see if I can implement them. Thank you for your service! It's help like that which helps me as I attempt to move from the "sucks at" part of the drupal learning curve ;-) I'll send you a link to check it out if I ever get it going.

Jon

Also, for your groups, check

chrisabbato - November 26, 2008 - 23:27

Also, for your groups, check out Organic Groups

Try using OG and Taxonomy access control

droople - November 29, 2008 - 14:01

Setup the site, so that pastor is main role and can edit any section of the site.

Add roles

-Pastor
-Mentors
-Shepherds
-Authenticated

Add OG

Add three OG node types

-mentor group (just for mentors role)
-sherpherds group (just for shpherds role)
-group (open to all)

The pastor is the admin for Mentor group, which can be joined by any monetor * the pastor

The Mentors are admins of shepherds groups, which can be joined by any shepherds,mentors, & pastor

Sheppherds are admins of generic groups, which can be joined by all

Group is a generic group open to all, with Shepherds as admins

--------

Using something like a simplenews module, you can customise it such that, when a one joins Group, they automatically subscribe to the group newsletter, and it is mandatory, meaning user is not presented with opt out option. Opting out is only possible by leaving the group. Create a view of users subscribed to a specific group/newsletter

When a Shepherd sends out newsletters, the Mentor/Pastor can just look at the list of group/newsletter subscribers..
When a Mentor sends out newsletters to Shepherds, the Pastor can just see the view of group/newsletter subscribers.

--------

When there is change in leadership, one is removed from a role, and his/her account password & email changed to suit the new leader's. That way any nodes submitted by Pastor, will stilll have the Pastor's title against them.

Thanks droople!

stieglitz - November 30, 2008 - 04:03

I kinda started out trying to skin the cat that way but got sidetracked. I'll probably have more questions as I actually try to implement it but you have given me an excellent start! Kinda scary giving the Pastor access to change the WHOLE site though! I am hoping I can configure permissions such that the Pastor's broad access can just be limited to OG.

Thanks again,

Jon