Church Website CMS?
December 22nd, 2007 by Carl Thomas.I design websites so there is absolutely no way I am willing to drop a grand on an outside firm to create a site for The Mission. I have a bare bones site made from Wordpress but am thinking about further functionality.
I came across Web Empowered Church which is based on Typo3. Here are the extensions it comes with. Has anyone used it? I would think that an open sourced web package would be built on drupal or Joomla given their prevelance but have not found one.
Can anyone recommend any such package? I need all the basics, sermon dl, directory, calender, and the likes with the additional functionality of a shopping cart capable of selling digital products.
This is where that church planting forum would come in handy.
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I built a fab ministry site off Mambo before I left the ExWitch team… the new folks are trying to convert it up to Joomla now and have run into snag after snag with it (they’re more patient than me, I’d have torn it down and rebuilt from scratch - but they’ve got a dedicated person to do it, and so…)
I’m thinking about building a church planting forum on the premise of, “If it’s built, they’ll come” — my provider will sell me the web space for cheap and I’ve got the tech know-how to do it. We had a VERY large forum at ExWitch, this would be smaller and much less contentious (I certainly hope…)
Presently I don’t have two pennies to pinch together for the space, domain, etc… We just had to drop $1000 on a new well pump, right at Christmas. (to say we’re deeply in need of a financial miracle would be an understatement!) I can get the whole shebang set up for about $20, I just don’t have it right now. So maybe the paycheck after Christmas I can spring for it…
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I can get a domain and I have my own server. I own about 30 websites so shared hosting was out of the question.
What forum script did you use at exwitch? It seems that there is Vbulletin and those who are hoping to get big enough to use vbulletin.
And I am praying for your financial breakthrough.
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Thank you for your prayers! It seems like everything’s at us all at once, and really it amounts to distraction. And we won’t be distracted or deterred from our purpose!
We used phpbb for a very long time, and then switched to SimpleMachines forum (SMF). Both met our needs but SMF, though FAR from “simple” (hahahah), was more robust, cost lest bandwidth, and abundantly more secure than the phpbb forum. Since security was a huge consideration, and one high-trafficked month after a TV spot sent the bandwidth bill up to several hundred dollars above what our package would cover, we really liked the SMF. Both are also an excellent price: free
I’ve heard good things about Vbulletin, and I also use a forum (as a member) daily which runs on IPBoard - both of which cost the $$. I’m not sure what you get for the $ that you don’t get with phpbb or SMF - but there may be considerations I don’t know about t’all because we never seriously considered these beyond “If we had the money there’s stuff we’d use it for other than software”. But this is a different environment, too - I daresay most of the folks showing up at a church planting forum will already own a Bible…
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I think the security issues were solved with phpbb3.
I think the top shelf forum software is vbulletin. Any forum software used other than that is until there are funds to buy vbulletin.
I have never really been excited with ipb. Not sure why. I’m just not.
The real need for this forum is that every church planting site I come across is made with the sole intention of selling products.
email me revivalblog funnyatsign gmail little dot com
Lets get some conversation going.
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Hey Carl! How’re you? Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and Happy Birthday and all that
Was wondering if you got the email I sent in reply about these issues? Sometimes when I don’t get a reply I wonder if it actually got to the person, or if their reply didn’t get back to me. I’ve been having huge issues with email lately
But maybe with Christmas and all you’re just busy. If that’s the case, no worries - but if you didn’t get an email from me that was my traditional rambling on style about a number of related issues let me know!
God bless!
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I did not get an email from you. I checked my spam folder and it is not in there either. I sent you an email but did not get a reply.
send me an email to revivalblog at gmail dot com
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