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Building Church Websites with Drupal (Installation) »

by Mike Goodwin on September 25th, 2008
In the first post of this series, I discussed the initial steps towards setting up your own church website using Drupal.  Specifically, I showed how to get your own domain name and webhosting set up.  By following those steps, you would have your own domain name and server space, but you would not have any actual site to display your church's information.  This is where the Drupal content... read more »

Building Church Websites with Drupal (First Steps) »

by Mike Goodwin on September 11th, 2008
This is the first post in a series on how to build church websites with the Drupal content management system.  In this post I will cover some of the intial steps that need to be taken before building a Drupal site.Step 1: Getting a Domain NameSimply put, the Internet is a massive network of connected computers, each of which has its own IP address.  For example, 216.239.51.99 is an IP address of... read more »

Building Church Websites with Drupal (Introduction) »

by Mike Goodwin on September 11th, 2008
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... read more »

Elston Family Church redesign »

by Mike Goodwin on September 3rd, 2008
We have re-designed the Elston Family Church website.  The navigation has been greatly simplified and cleaned up.  Additionally, the front page has been used as a highlight of the church's various ministries, guiding site visitors to their pages of interest. read more »

Druplicon in Blender »

by Mike Goodwin on August 10th, 2008
Drupal is my CMS of choice.  I really enjoy its power and flexibility.  The more I learn about it, the more I like it.  Awhile back there was talk in the Drupal community about a lack of nice wallpapers.  I thought that it would be cool to have a 3-d version of the Druplicon as a wallpaper.  So, I decided to use the great open source Blender software to create a model of the Druplicon.  I... read more »

How Drupal Works »

by Mike Goodwin on July 23rd, 2008
I have built numerous websites using the Drupal content management system.  I have a fairly firm grasp of how the code behind Drupal works, especially after reading the Pro Drupal Development book.  However, I really want to understand the nitty gritty details of how Drupal works.  Therefore, I have decided to begin an in depth review of how the code behind Drupal works.  I will start at the... read more »

Initial Drupal 6 Thoughts »

by Mike Goodwin on July 1st, 2008
As I noted before, I have begun development on my first Drupal 6 site.  I must say that so far, really enjoy the new system.  Here are a few things I have noticed:User access page improvement: One thing that has annoyed me about every Drupal 5 site that I have built is the user permissions administration page.  The page is a very long list of checkboxes which gives granular control of what... read more »

First Drupal 6 Site »

by Mike Goodwin on June 24th, 2008
In the near future we will unveil our latest site, for First Southern Baptist Church in Terre Haute, IN.  This site is near completion and is built on Drupal 5.  We will also soon commence our first site using Drupal 6 in the very near future.  We have been somewhat hesitant to build sites with Drupal 6 due to nonavailability of modules like Views and CCK, but the latest versions of these modules... read more »

Carnival custom module development »

by Mike Goodwin on June 4th, 2008
A few years ago, when I was very new to the web development scene, I created a static site for Elston Family Church.  Approximately one year ago I re-launched the site using Drupal 5, complete with many of the well-known modules and a custom theme.  The site has worked quite well for the church thus far.  However, they have an upcoming carnival for which they needed some custom module... read more »

Imagefield Import module »

by Mike Goodwin on May 20th, 2008
A new module has recently been released to the Drupal community. It's called "Imagefield Import". This module has the potential to be very useful to all of the sites that are built by Red Leaf Media. Due to the way in which we handle the setup of photo galleries on our sites, each photo exists as a Drupal "node". In the past, each individual photo must be uploaded and submitted one at a time,... read more »

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