Converted Church Website to Wordpress - Love it!!!

[Semper Fidelis]

It used to be that Wordpress was a nice blogging medium but not quite a CMS. A little over a year ago I worked with Fred Greco to try and design a Church site that was built in a Content Management System. The benefit of a CMS is that you type the content once in an easy to use interface that doesn't require much expertise and then you can change the theme or elements around the content as needed. The content, which is most important, never changes.

Well, the first attempt succeeded in Drupal but it proved to be too difficult for the average Church user to figure out. We then turned to Wordpress, which at the time was a bit clunky for the task. We were able to succeed but not without the frustration of some plugins that came and went.

Well, due to the size of the community, the platform has improved dramatically. Fred has had a really nice site in Wordpress for some time (Christ Church PCA » Home) but I was still dealing with the hassle of html based sites using Dreamweaver. The old Church website for Central Baptist Church can be seen here:

Central Baptist Church, Okinawa, Japan

It was always a hassle to add a new teaching - I'd have to post something to Blogger and find it's link and then add another row in Dreamweaver for that teaching. Then I'd have to upload the mp3 and create an m3u file for it. I'd then have to modify my podcast.xml file and make sure I didn't dork up that process. Each new teaching took about 15 minutes of work.

With Wordpress, I can use the Copy from Word feature of Wordpress, add the MP3 link and, using Podpress (a plugin), the post and the MP3 are all set up. Add to that, the person can listen to the teaching right on the page.

Here's the new site: » Home Central Baptist Church, Okinawa, Japan: Spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Okinawa

Here's an example of the teaching from yersterday: » Repent and Be Baptized (Acts 2:22-41) Central Baptist Church, Okinawa, Japan: Spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Okinawa

I'm going to create a How-To on WebsiteMaven because there are a bunch of concepts, including Google Apps, that have made it possible for Churches to have incredibly feature rich applications and sites using completely free products and the only thing they'll need to pay for is a domain and a hosting account.

 

[Ivan]

The new site looks great, Rich!!

 

[py3ak]

That's a very nice website.

There is one typo where you give the service times --there's an "h" missing from month on the Men's Bible studies.

 

[tcalbrecht]

Good job, Rich. I use WP to maintain our church web site. See link in my sig.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Good job, Rich. I use WP to maintain our church web site. See link in my sig.

Just to share a few plugins that I've found very helpful:

WordPress › podPress « WordPress Plugins - I would pay $ for this plugin. It makes adding audio to your site so easy as well as formatting everything for submission of your podcast to iTunes and a few other podcasting services.

WordPress › cformsII - contact form « WordPress Plugins - Allows you to create a contact form with every bell and whistle imaginable, including a CAPTCHA form.

WordPress › ESV « WordPress Plugins - Converts cited Scriptures to links or even inline texts or quotes.

WordPress › Flexi Pages Widget « WordPress Plugins - Makes the display of pages very flexible. Create multiple page lists as well as the ability to display sub-pages only after the main page has been clicked.

WordPress › Folding Categories for Wordpress 2.3 « WordPress Plugins - Useful for organizing into multiple categories. This is how I've organized the teaching section.

WordPress › WP-Footnotes « WordPress Plugins - Easily integrates footnotes into posts or pages.