Much of the work that I've done recently with Drupal has focused on churches and ministries. As such, I wanted to write a short series of blog posts about building Drupal church sites.
Why Drupal?
A good church website should contain many types of content. For example, events, sermons, videos, photos, and normal "static" information pages can provide a nearly comprehensive view of a church's philosphopy and personality. Additionally, various groups of people, such as pastors, church members, potential visitors, etc. will interact with the site differently. These complex needs automatically make old-school website maintenance (viz. manually writing HTML pages and uploading them to servers) very impractical. As such, a content management system (CMS) of some sort is required. A CMS allows users to easily add, edit and remove information from a site directly in their web browser. All of the information is stored in a database rather than hard-coded into HTML files.
The choice of CMS can be quite daunting for lay people in the church who have little experience in web development. Proprietary systems such as Vignette can be quite expensive. With the typical small budgets of churches and ministries, such systems are out of the question. This often leads them to the land of open source CMS's such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Each of these systems has a large following and a good reputation, making the choice seem arbitrary. However, in my experience I have found that Drupal's fine-grained user control in combination with its ultra-flexibility make it the best choice. You don't have to take just my word for it. The Geeks and God podcast did a good series of chosing CMS's a few years back. Although this information is a little old at this point, I think that they make good points.
What Next?
Once you have decided to use Drupal, the system can seem quite intimidating. There are hundreds of modules and themes available on drupal.org, and most inexperienced people have no idea where to begin. In this series of posts I hope to explain in detail many aspects of building a Drupal site for a church or ministry. This series will focus on Drupal 5, which will make it somewhat outdated in the near future. Never the less, many of the concepts should apply to later versions of Drupal.
