Red Leaf Media

Planning

In the first and second posts of this series, I described how to setup a Drupal installation for a church website. Now that you have a functioning Drupal site, you need to start bending it to your will. However, before you start pushing buttons and changing settings, you should really think about your site's needs. In my experience, church sites have many basic needs including some or all of:

• basic church information (staff, beliefs, etc.)
• ministry information (information, personnel, meeting times, etc.)
• events calendar
• image galleries
• church directory
• sermons
• videos

Drupal can do all of this and more. You just have to plan out the information structure of the site.

Content Types

The first stage of planning is deciding which "content types" you want for your site. For example, the needs listed above would lead you to want content types of "page", "ministry", "event", "photo", "directory entry", "sermon" and "video". In Drupal 6, you can add these content types by going to "Administer->Content Management->Content Types" then clicking the "Add Content Type" tab. Once you have done this you will have several "types" of content on the site. However, at this point, there is not much to distinguish between the types of content. They will all have the basic title and body setup, possibly with different names for these fields if you changed them in the content type addition form.

Fields

The ability to customize content types to fit your needs is made possible by the CCK (Content Construction Kit) module. You must download this module to your "sites/all/modules" directory and enable it at "Administer->Site Building->Modules". CCK provides you with the ability to add "fields" to each content type. The CCK module itself provides a few relatively simple types of fields, such as textfields, radio buttons and checkboxes. However, there are many other CCK-related modules that provide a wide range of field types. These are the ones that you will be using:

• Imagefield - for image fields
• Date - for date fields
• Email - for email fields
• Embedded Media Field - for embedding videos

You will need to download all of these modules and place them in your "sites/all/modules" directory. Then enable them as usual. There may be specific settings for each module that you can tweak, but I will try to keep this post relatively simple. So, we will forge ahead. Once the CCK fields are available you by going to "Administer->Content Management->Content Types" then clicking "Manage Fields" for the content type of choice. You should now be able to add a new field to that content type, give it a label, alter available settings and more. Once you do so, the field should show up in the node creation form. These are the fields that I use for my content types:

Ministry

Ministry pages don't need much aside from a title and description. However, you can add an imagefield to associate an image with each ministry. You can also add text fields for the names of ministry leaders.

Event

Events need several fields, aside from a title and description. You should add a date and/or end date to events. You should also add a location using the location module, which is not strictly CCK but is very similar. You can also add other fields for contacts, images, etc.

Photo

You obviously need to add an imagefield to each photo node.

Directory Listing

Listings in directories can have various fields. You can add textfields for family member names. You can also add an email field for contact information and/or another location "field". An imagefield for a photo of the family is also worth adding.

Sermon

Sermons can also have various fields. You can have textfields for speaker names and scripture references. You can also add a date field for when the sermon was given.

Video

You need to add an embedded media field to video nodes. I'm assuming that you don't want to host large video files on your own site and will rahter you something like Youtube or Vimeo.

Conclusion

This should get you well down the road towards a functional Drupal site. The next step will be to theme the site to look and function the way that you want it.