Godbit Project

Drupal Multi-Site for Churches

2009-06-30T05:38:27Z

I recently had the opportunity to do a presentation on multi-site setups in Drupal for the Jamaican Drupal Group. The premise of a multi-site setup is that you have more than one website using a single install (or code base) of Drupal as opposed to having separate installations for each website. Some of you may already be familiar with this if you use Wordpress MU. What’s cool about Drupal is it doesn’t require a different edition. Drupal supports multi-site “out of the box.”

We use Drupal’s multi-site capabilities at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica to run a number of our department sites, and are currently building out several more. After sharing my presentation with fellow Godbit member Nathan Smith, he pointed out that this type of information could be beneficial to large ministries as well, and encouraged me to share it here.

A number of churches have multiple campuses, each with their own subdomains running on separate installs of various content management systems. According to Nathan, a recurring theme is the desire for one CMS to handle multiple sites.

For churches with this particular need, a multi-site setup could be a very good idea. All these sites could share a single code base, making it easier to do core updates for all sites, rather than having several installations of a CMS sitting on the same server and having to update each one separately.

There are other advantages to multi-site setups such as being able to share themes, modules, content and users across all sites. This means there you could have multiple sites, but use a single sign-on throughout. This is something that both Warner Brothers Music and Sony Music have achieved via Drupal.

Of course, multi-site setups do have a few slight disadvantages, some of which are pointed out in the presentation. Therefore, it’s up to you whether or not you decide to go this route. With that said though, I hope the presentation slides and video will prove to be informative and helpful. If there are any corrections or suggestions, please feel free to let me know so that the slides can be updated and future presentations can be improved.

College Park Church

2009-05-25T21:42:47Z

URL: yourchurch.com

I first came across College Park Church while browsing the portfolio work of Chris Merritt from Pixelight Creative. If you get a chance do take a look at the work he has done, you’ll find there are a number of good sites there, including the recently redesigned YouVersion website.

One of the things that stood out to me when I first saw the College Park website was the logo. The tree leaves above the two L’s in college adds a nice touch. The site has nice colours and the textures (both wood and grunge) add to the earthy/church plant theme. Service times are located at the top along with a Map & Directions link, Ministry guide and search. I thought that while good that it was there, the service times could have been a bit more prominent on the home page. It felt a little hidden in it’s current location. The Ministry guide slide out was also nice and reminded me of Table of Contents slide out on the CodeIgniter User Guide.

As you navigate the site you always know what’s going on at College Park Church. Upcoming events are listed in the sidebar on a number of pages and the same is true of the Latest Sermon, which is just a click away. I really liked the idea of having the “Sunday Package” which comes bundled with Sermon Audio in mp3 format, Sermon Manuscript, Study Guide, Service Bulletin and News & Opportunities.

Behind the scenes the site uses the Ekklesia 360 Church Content Management System which has proven itself to be a very good CMS for many churches as can be seen in the Ekklesia portfolio. The site strives for XHTML 1.0 Strict and while there are a few errors here and there, for the most part the code is well written and standards compliant. The same is true of their CSS, with most of the errors due to hacks to play nice with Internet Explorer.

Hats off to Chris Merritt and all who were involved in the design/development of the College Park Church website.

Drupal 6 Themes

2009-05-25T21:12:23Z

Over the past year and a half I’ve been doing quite a bit of work with Drupal, a free and open source Content Management System (CMS). Whenever I’m asked how I’m finding Drupal, my answer is usually that, “I have a love hate relationship with it.” There is no doubt that Drupal is a very powerful and flexible CMS and more and more companies, universities, communities and individuals are using it. If you don’t believe me just look through the various Case Studies and also the list of Drupal sites posted by Drupal’s creator and project lead, Dries Buytaert. Most of my frustrations came from the fact that I’m used to having complete control over the markup behind the sites I build. At first I found this not to be the case with Drupal, but as I began to work more and more with it and learn the ins and outs, I started to see how to regain that control.

Enter Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves. This book opened my eyes to some things that I didn’t know or understand about theming Drupal. While this book is geared towards Drupal 6, there were quite a few things I was able to learn and apply to Drupal 5 which is the version of Drupal that we are currently using at work (The other option of course would be to buy Drupal 5 themes by the same Author and Publisher). As the book rightly says “Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6.”

The 1st few chapters (1-3) discuss the basics of Drupal theming. I felt these chapters weren’t really for me since I was already familiar with the basics. However, it will be very good for person’s not familiar with Drupal theming at all. It describes what a theme is, how to add new themes and how to configure those themes. Theme engines are also discussed. Drupal is capable of using a variety of theming engines to build sites, such as Smarty, PHPTal and XTemplate. However, Drupal is distributed with PHPTemplate which relies on good old PHP and which many PHP developers are already familiar with.

Chapters 4-5 then delve into template files, themable functions and how to intercept and override them. This is where you begin to regain control over the markup output by Drupal and it’s modules and are able to customize it the way you want it. One of the nice things about Drupal is that there are certain themable functions in the core and in contributed modules that follow a naming convention (ie. ‘theme_function_name’), which makes it easy for you to identify and override the functionality and output from it’s original format. The principles of naming conventions applies to overriding templates as well. For instance one of the template files that is essential to every Drupal theme is the page.tpl.php file. This controls the general layout of the site and does most of the heavy lifting. You could for instance override this and have a different look for your user pages by simply creating a new file called page-user.tpl.php and making adjustments as necessary. You can do a whole lot more, but I’ll let you read the book to find out all the juicy details.

Chapter 6, shows you to modify an existing theme, the Zen theme, which prides itself on being flexible and one of the better themes to start with when learning how to create themes in Drupal. Chapters 7-8 continue to build upon and tie everything together. Ric shows you how to create a theme from scratch and have multiple page templates. You will also learn how to control how your theme is displayed based on the type of content, the user viewing it and other factors. Lastly, chapter 9 demonstrates how to theme the various forms generated by the Drupal core. A form I found myself wanting to customize recently was the User Login Block, luckily for me, this was covered in the book and I learnt the different approaches to modifying this and other forms within Drupal.

With all that said, if you’re new to theming in Drupal, I definitely recommend this book. Ric did a good job of giving a solid foundation and covering most of what you need to know to comfortably create themes in Drupal.

TYPO3 Recap / Kasper Skårhøj

2009-04-22T01:23:06Z

This past weekend, I had a chance to attend the first ever TYPO3 Conference held in North America (huge in Germany and the rest of Europe). Luckily for me, it was held right in the Dallas / Fort Worth area — Irving, to be exact. Serendipitously, I happened to know Ron Hall and Jeff Segars, the organizers of the conference.

For those of you not familiar with TYPO3, it is an enterprise level content management system written in PHP. As of the latest release, it runs solely on PHP5, a gutsy move for an open source project. Anyway, Ron and Jeff encouraged me to attend the conference. Even though I’m not a big TYPO3 user myself, three churches I’ve worked with (design / front-end) use it to power their sites.

So, when I heard about this opportunity to hang out with a cool group of PHP developers, most of which came all the way from Europe to attend, I thought I outta check it out. To me, one of the coolest things about TYPO3 is its founder Kasper Skårhøj, who decided to give away the CMS for free as open source software. Cooler still, is that he is unashamedly Christian. I was able to sit down with him for a bit at dinner, in between mock gunfights being staged at Austin Ranch.

(Note to self, blanks sound just like the real thing.) While he is a very busy guy, I am happy that Kasper was able to humor me with an informal interview for Godbit. Since I don’t have a direct transcript, I will generally summarize our conversation. Hopefully it will accurately reflect his good humored nature.

Why Open Source?

First off, I asked him why he chose to give away TYPO3 — seemingly leaving money on the table, given the widespread popularity and use on high-profile sites such as Cisco’s WebEx site (View source, and you’ll see it’s powered by TYPO3).

Kasper responded that had he charged a hefty fee for TYPO3, it probably would not have caught on as well as it has, so in that regard it is probably a catch-22. He said that he had several main reasons for releasing it free of charge:

He wanted it to glorify God, and help ministries with limited budgets.
He dislikes the administrative overhead involved in running a business.
He wanted TYPO3 to be about sharing, collaboration, and community.

“Retirement?”

Now that Kasper has turned over the reins of lead developer to Robert Lemke, who is heading up the development of TYPO3 version 5, I asked Kasper what his plans are for his “retirement.” He said that he is just trying to learn and absorb as much of life and information as he can, and enjoying not having the burden of long hours programming. He said that he felt fortunate that the inspiration to build TYPO3 hit when he was relatively young, and without other responsibilities. Now he is happily married and is loving being a father. Having more time to spend with his family is at the top of his priority list.

He hinted that perhaps someday he might become an active code contributor again, but for now is perfectly contented passing the torch, yet still being active in the strong European community that has formed around TYPO3.

As an aside, I’ve been told if you walk into a bookstore in Germany, and look in the computer science section, alongside programming languages you will find a section devoted just to TYPO3. To me, that is truly amazing. As a biproduct of Kasper’s vision for ministry and free software, it is now used by successful business — including 3M, BMW, Mercedes, and Volkswagen — to name a few.

Giving Back

In addition to his attitude towards open software, Kasper also runs a philanthropic business in his hometown. Actually, he attributes this effort to being led by his wife. It is a fair-trade coffee shop that is run mostly by volunteers, the profits from which go to benefiting charitable relief efforts in less fortunate countries.

The atmosphere in the bistro is relaxed and conversational, encouraging people to talk about issues of religion and faith, while not trying to coerce any particular outcome — though, hoping and praying for those they meet, that they might meet Christ. He said that this has been one of the more rewarding uses of his time.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not mention the Web Empowered Church, a non-profit ministry organization that builds church management features atop of TYPO3. Mark Stephenson, the director of WEC, was also in attendance at the Dallas conference. It was great hearing his vision for tech + ministry.

It was communicated to me by a member of WEC that while Kasper appreciates all the companies / agencies out there who have built their sites and / or business models on TYPO3, he is especially glad that there are ministries that are benefiting from the CMS, which was his original inspiration for creating it.

All in all, I had a blast hanging out with everyone, and want to thank the members of the TYPO3 community for allowing me to crash the party and ask n00bish questions about this powerful CMS. Hopefully they’ll be back in 2010! :)

MemberHub

2009-04-21T21:30:22Z

I first heard about MemberHub from a friend of mine, John Long. Through that connection, I had the opportunity to talk with one of the founders of a father-son ran company, Matt Harrell.

Robert:

To get it started, could you tell me about MemberHub, what it is, who it is targeted at, and it’s purpose?

Matt:

MemberHub creates a centralized place for churches to handle organization and communication among ministries, groups and teams. MemberHub allows church staff and members to seamlessly handle the logistics, administration and communication that often drain time and money. Churches can provide the means to build relationship-oriented communities through one simple login. Through the use of private, online hubs, members can connect with and contribute to their various ministries by accessing an easy-to-use shared calendar with automatic reminders, discussions, shared documents, and customized announcement streams via text messaging (SMS). Members are empowered to get organized and connect with each other, while giving staff the tools to better manage those interactions. Staff can manage membership information, schedule events and have small groups manage themselves in their own private communication hubs.

It is our intention to build a generic tool that can be used by any member-driven organization to enhance communication, member involvement and ultimately membership management. We have strategically decided to first address the needs of churches as many churches begin to explore online community software and using the internet to enhance communication and collaboration among the various ministries, small groups, sunday schools, other groups. After churches, non-profit organizations and associations are a natural fit.

Robert:

So, initially MemberHub was created with the Church in mind, but keeping it open to non-profits in general? What makes MemberHub unique when compared to other similar tools like StaffTool?

Matt:

Eventually, MemberHub and StaffTool will have many similarities on the membership management side of features. StaffTools does a great job of managing member “records” and is clearly a tool for church administrators. They also have group communications tools, but not to the extent that MemberHub does. The key element to MemberHub is the “hub”. Each group gets their own hub where members not only get a mailing list, but powerful shared calendar, a place to upload files (and photos soon) and ways to receive instant notification and reminders via text messaging. Members interact in the hubs and the real strength in MemberHub lies in the fact that members can be affiliated with multiple hubs…even across multiple organizations (your church and your non-profit). So we’ve focused on the member side a lot. The rest of this year we will be focusing on membership management. While we do have existing features to help church administrators manage groups and members, we have more features to add like importing member records, adding people manually, registrations, donations, pledges, etc. before we can bill ourselves confidently as membership management app.

Robert:

What was your motivation for building MemberHub?

Matt:

There are various things that motivated us to build MemberHub!

First off, Loren has much experience building membership management applications in his early days as a programmer and has been motivated to create a web-based version of one using his knowledge.

Every church, non-profit, association, club, etc. always sights member communications as a problem. Or I should say it’s the number 1 complaint among members every year. The COO of the YMCA of the Triangle told us that their yearly member surveys’ reveal this trend. Members of organizations are looking to use the internet to not only communicate with other members, but take care of the business of being a member of groups in those orgs…planning, logistics, registering, coordinating. Members want to do it but aren’t empowered. MemberHub empowers ministries to get organized and it saves the church admins time!

We love building software; we’re both developers!

I’m passionate about building “usable” software

Dad and I were looking to build a business together

We want to serve!!

Robert:

The pricing strategy is very interesting and similar to the style of Amazon. What were your thoughts behind this?

Matt:

So this is a very interesting and timely question. We’re getting ready to change the our pricing model in a few weeks! Basically the price that we came to is based on looking at competitors and also asking what’s an affordable price to offer for our services. We want to be the simple, affordable solution to group communication and eventually membership management. We feel as if $0.10 cents per person per month is more than affordable and by selling this in blocks of 100 people it makes it easy to calculate your costs. We will be changing our price to $0.12 per person per month and will offer a couple of different packages based on that rate. We’ve realized that for larger organizations with thousands of members we can offer even more discounted prices.

Robert:

So, tell me what it is like to work with your Father?

Matt:

It’s been a huge blessing to work with my dad. At first, we certainly were curious if we’d be able to work so close together. We quickly realized that not only could we with each other, but that our gifts are different and they compliment each other. He’s more of the direct, independent and self-motivated type. While I’m a little of the same, I tend to deal with people and conflict better and motivated by teams and exemplify servant leadership. Although I’ve never met a bigger servant in my life than my father. There are times that are challenging, but we’re literally best friends and business partners and we work side-by-side every day. I praise God for that!

Robert:

How did you come to faith in Jesus Christ?

Matt:

After putting God on the back burner for much of life I started to really seek towards the end of my college days. God directed my footsteps and I became involved in my church and other bible studies where God’s word began to shape and change me. I became confident in my faith in Jesus during a men’s bible study here in Raleigh in April of 2001. So my walk with Jesus has been a longer one then some. It certainly wasn’t an overnight thing. I know faith itself is a gift from God and I’m thankful for that too.

Robert:

Anything else you’d like to say to the Godbit readers?

Matt:

One thing that I would like to share is that I tend to agree with other leaders in the online community that we as Christians don’t need or want a Christian social network. To reach others for Jesus is worthy goal for using social networking. However, there are so many instances where churches are looking to use social networking for communications, logistics, planning, etc. when that’s not at all what social networking is intended for. It’s intended to “network”.

But when you’re in a church and are involved in various ministries and groups you don’t need to network with these folks, you need take care of the business of being a member. You need to plan, share a calendar, get reminders, have discussions and generally be accessible to each other. Technology and the internet is perfect for that! It’s not about social networking. It’s about giving the groups in your church and other organizations a place for them to connect, share information, share ideas, pray for each other, continue the conversation, plan, and again, be accessible to each other. This takes the burden off the administrators of the church, by empowering the ministries to connect and get things done on their own accord. This is what churches can accomplish when they use MemberHub. And we’re here to help them every step of the way!