Posted by philbar on November 1, 2009 at 6:11pm
Sermon Podcast
15% (6 votes)
Staff Directory
0% (0 votes)
Donations (Online Tithing)
3% (1 vote)
Pastor Blog
5% (2 votes)
Ministry Groups (OG)
18% (7 votes)
Prayer Board
0% (0 votes)
Events and Calendar
60% (24 votes)
Total votes: 40
Categories: Distributions
Comments
We use Google Calendar for
We use Google Calendar for events. Gcal events was just clunky, and Google Calendar is too powerful to not use.
Pastor Dale
http://crossfeednews.com/podcast
Integrated or external link?
Agree Google Cal has great functionality. But I would prefer to have it better integrated into a drupal site.
How do you handle that? Do you just link to the google cal? Or do you embed it into your site somehow?
I just use Google's embed
I just use Google's embed code. It's pretty powerful. Don't remember where it is, but it's in your Google Calendar in settings or something. Check out our site http://shepherdoftheridge.org for an implementation. I stripped it down quite a bit to make it fit in the sidebar on smaller monitors.
Pastor Dale
http://crossfeednews.com/podcast
Good Idea on the Calendar
I use Google Calendar on our church site and I'm planning to migrate it to Drupal soon... I may "borrow" your idea and use the event list for blocks rather than calendar view. http://www.montevallofbc.com/calendar.html is how I use it now...
One thing to check - your location of "Sanctuary" for services is mapping to Sanctuary Texas and some of the others map to places I suspect are not your church. May not pose a problem, just FYI...
Membership Directory
I would recommend having a membership directory that is only available to Church members. You could have a registered user that users could self register for, but does not give them access to this directory, and use the Role Apply module (I think that's what its called) to allow them to apply to Church staff to be upgraded to Confirmed member, granting them access to the Church Membership Directory.
Membership Photo Directory
Our church used to have a printed photo directory courtesy of OlanMills or similar photography studio. I'd like to see something similar done on-line using a custom profile up-datable by the members. The catch is, many of our members will never login to update their information, nor view the on-line directory, thus an ability to periodically output the information in a printable booklet format is needed.
Keeping a directory current and accessible is a tough job, but essential to maintaining good communications with members.
Information is free, knowledge is acquired, but wisdom is earned.
Scripture popups
I really like the scripture popup functionality that was described in this post on drupal.org awhile ago.
http://drupal.org/node/315932
They were able to create database tables for publicly available Bibles in several languages and then use regex matching and jquery to put in these popups giving the scripture when you hover over a link. It turned out pretty cool. I wonder if this could be turned into a module. I talked a little with the developers, but they said they have no time for it right now.
Check out NETBibleTagger
Check out NETBibleTagger http://labs.bible.org/blog/netbibletagger_drupal_module
We use it and are pretty impressed.
Pastor Dale
http://crossfeednews.com/podcast
Volunteer
Cool idea. I can't offer a lot of time (seems to be the biggest problem, eh?), but I'll volunteer to help if someone would be willing to take the lead in developing a module with this functionality.
Until then I guess we'll all keep using the NETBibleTagger module mentioned above.
David Needham
Enjoy Creativity.
--
David Needham
Team Lead of Training at Datadog
If the idea of the ministry
If the idea of the ministry groups is to have a place for the groups to collaborate, I think this may be best as an Open Atrium site. My church has rolled an OA site for ministry teams and it is great. We are trying to move our main web site to be a public facing marketing/info/welcome site for the church.
Thanks!
Drupal for Churches features
I currently run a non-profit with a custom CMS system for churches and non-profits. We are moving everything to Drupal. I hope to duplicate all of our current features plus add more because of Drupal's great possibilities. Currently our most used features (in order) are:
calendar and upcoming events
photo albums
Stories
Pages for staff and ministries
Downloads (weekly bulletins, prayer lists, newsletters)
Mailing lists (with attachments like newsletters, photos, etc.)
Custom user created blocks for:
donations
location & google maps
We added a Prayer Board feature about 6 months ago. No one uses it - yet
We added classified ads a year ago. No one uses it.
They do use Amazon items, Link Lists ( we let them make multiple lists of links) and RSS feeds (outgoing and incoming)
I think part of the issue is showing them how these features can grow their ministries. when I show a feature and explain how it could help - they tend to use it.
I'm really anxious to work on this project. Hope this info helps.
Volunteer Module
One of the challenges our church faces is recruiting and coordinating volunteers. I'd be interested in hearing how other churches are handling this using Drupal.
Information is free, knowledge is acquired, but wisdom is earned.