Drupal for a church website

I recently launched a website for a church in Huntsville, Alabama called Sojourn Church. The site is running Drupal 4.7.3 and in built with community building and communication in mind. The site supports podcasts, blogs, events, event signups and reminders, newsletters, groups, forums, and news announcements.

The site has been live only a few weeks but is already appearing in the top of search engine results pages. Several people have already attended the church by finding the site through search engines. This has been extremely satisfying for the church leadership. Drupal and the theme’s search engine optimization are to thank for that.

What good would the site be if the church leadership couldn’t use the site? What good would it be if website visitors couldn’t use it? Or if they couldn’t find it via search engines?

Drupal has made it easy for the church leadership to manage their website. Some have never blogged before. They had definitely never published a podcast. Now they are taking control of the site and users are responding. This is great to see others use the site and want to learn more about it.

Speaking of the technical curve needed to make content in Drupal, about one hour of training has gotten Sojourn thus far. However, I am planning on 2 or 3 one-hour training sessions in the next few months for the church leadership to ask all the questions they can about their website and the internet. Other than that, I am thankful that it has been so easy for the leadership to post content.

The blogs on the site are starting to take off. Website visitors are clicking through the blogosphere and finding blog posts on the website. For instance, the website is seeing traffic from keyword searches like "Amish Grace" or local searches like "Monte Sano hike". Again, this is encouraging to church leaders as they see the benefit of investing time into blogging. One blog post can be published and reach more people online than in the physical church meeting place.

The sound team at the church can easily upload MP3 files which get published on the website as podcasts. In about 10 mouse clicks, the files are FTP’d, found by audio.module, and published. This makes podcasting (which can seem really complex and technical) easy for an inexperienced content management system user.

A list of non-standard modules that Sojourn is running:
Akismet (to ward of spam)
Audio (for the podcast nodes)
Audio_import (to import the mp3 files)
Blogapi (for blogging from Word or other platforms)
Commentrss (for bloggers to follow comments and discussion)
Gmap, gmap_location, and location (for inserting Google Maps into nodes --- great for events)
Googleanalytics (for sharing website stats with church leadership)
Forward (for visitors to share the site with friends)
Og and friends (for small group collaboration)
Panels (to help with block positioning)
Pathauto (human friendly URL’s)
Scripture filter (automatically links verses to online Bibles)
Signup (to estimate attendance)
Tagadelic (to add some Web 2.0 flavor)
Views (to help take control of presenting information to the screen)

The theme is built from the Foundation theme. Other have suggested that I build my themes from one of the default themes that ships with Drupal. I mean, just playing around with the package install, I would assume that I should modify an existing theme shipped with Drupal in order to create a new theme. I found myself limited and hitting frequent roadblocks.

I then discovered Foundation which just clicked with me. It's a blank theme that doesn't have intimidating looking CSS files. I could easily develop from that CSS file. I found that developing in Firefox’s Web Developer’s CSS editor the easiest way to write the CSS files. For anyone looking to develop a custom theme, I recommend starting off with Foundation.

I will also recommend that a “raw” or “foundation” theme get shipped in core packages of Drupal. Or, I commend that these “raw” or “foundation” themes have their own section in the “THEMES” section of Drupal.org. My point? To make it easy for future themers to find the building blocks for their themes. These blank themes kind of get lost in the Drupal.org THEMES gallery page.

Perhaps those blank themes could get a quick mention in the "Drupal Themes" block located on the Drupal.org THEMES gallery page. BTW: It's nice to see that "Drupal Themes" block on that page. It contains great resources for theme developers.

And finally, I would like to say that the Sojourn Church site is really my first production website. I don’t know PHP, XHTML, CSS or MySQL well at all. What I’ve learned has come through the Drupal support forums and random Google searches. I hope this is encouragement to others out there.

I’ve dabbled in Drupal before, but I’ve never published a site for another organization that isn’t mine. There’s a huge difference between building a website for yourself and building one for others. My experience in developing with Drupal has been pleasant. I had been using Drupal for about 2 years on sites that really didn’t matter and got very little traffic. During that time I never really grasped how powerful Drupal could be. I am amazed at what I’ve missed out on in the past 2 years of casual web design.