Posted by ccoppen on March 17, 2011 at 10:53am
We released this site last year, and I've been making tweaks as I go. It's currently in process of being upgraded from D6 - D7 on my local machine. I have yet to get the sermon section down, but I wanted to get a few ideas from the community on how to make it better. I didn't design the site, someone in our church did that. I just ported his psd to a custom theme.
Site: http://www.3rbc.com
Drupal Version: 6
Location: Irmo, SC (near Columbia, SC)
Categories: christianity, church, Drupal, website, Groups.Drupal Church
Comments
A few thoghts
You might want to put your site's header on the Access ACS's page for a better branded look and feel. Also, we do some blogging on our public site, so we decided to install the acs module to allow church members to log in to the Drupal site with the Access ACS username and password.
Thanks for the thoughts
At the time, the ACS Module was in development and I had tried to get with ACS to have access to their API, but got the run around. After talking with someone, they told me this was the way to do it. I'll look into the ACS Module again to see if it's viable to use. Maybe integrate it with my D7 version of the website. I would much prefer to integrate ACS with Drupal rather than open new windows.
The ACS module is doing the work
Well, so far so good. Church members are able to login with their ACS credentials. The module creates an account with ACS username that authenticates again ACS's server. The login time is long, but I think it is the ACS;s server that are slow. All in all, the solution works fine, but we would like a way to bring most of the ACS profile info to the Drupal site. Maybe some integrations with Token or some other way.
Any success with ACS?
Wondering if you ever figured out how to integrate your sites with ACS. The ACS module you mention seems to have been abandoned; there's no Drupal 7 version. We use ACS at our 1000-member church, but find its user interface beyond terrible. To make an annual pledge, a congregant has to click through five or six pages, all of them at the ACS site. And if we use ACS for religious education sign-ups, even if we post the classes on our own site, ACS completely takes over our CSS. I'm somewhat amazed that the folks at ACS haven't addressed these problems themselves. Anyway . . . if you've had any success integrating your Drupal site with ACS, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks.
search results page
Have you thought of hiding the content types from the search results page under advanced search?
Yes
but I just haven't put the appropriate CSS in my stylesheet yet. It's not a high priority as I've focused on content. Currently, attempting to upgrade to D7 and it's a painstakingly slow process. I've never encountered such a bad upgrade process.
why are you upgrading?
I was just sort of curious why you were rushing to upgrade. I would think you'd find the process of developing the site much less frustrating if you were continuing to work with D6 and the more mature base of modules. Just a thought...
I like the new features
With Drupal 7, a number of modules from D6 could be eliminated, such as admin bar, most of cck, etc. That being said, this particular site is not on Drupal anymore. Within the last 2 months, I was able to convert it to Wordpress. I went from 125 tables or so down to 25. It runs faster and cleaner and is better with SEO.
I'm not ditching Drupal for projects however. My full-time job is fully reliant on Drupal.
I've come to learn that Drupal might be better for medium to large sites, but small sites, it contains too much overhead.
At least this will give me skills in Wordpress in the process as well.