This is a guest post by Tom McFarlin.
One of the nice things about the modern web is that after you’ve secured your domain and your host, it’s relatively easy to get started publishing some content online.
Well. Sort of.
For some people, it’s a matter of building the website and launching it into cyberspace. For others, it’s just another place where more decisions have to be made. But we don’t have that kind of time. We need some software that will do the heavy lifting for us. Luckily, there are a lot of free tools out there that can help ease our pain.
We’ll take a look at a few of them after the jump.
Blog vs. CMS
Before spending too much time shopping around for what software we want to use, it’s important to understand the difference between a blogging platform and a content management system (or CMS).
Blogs feature frequent posts from an author (or a set of authors) that appear on the homepage. Other static pages may contribute to the overall site, but the nature of frequent publishing and the community-driven content – such as comments – help to give it its defining qualities.
Content management systems cater toward static content. They separate areas of a website such as the top logo, the footer, the navigation area, and the content each of which can be customized by the user. CMS’s are great for websites that won’t be updated regularly.
Of course, people do use blogs as CMS’s and people have coerced CMS’s into blogs. Our goal is to make getting your church online as easy as possible so doing this is outside the scope of this article.
Free Tools
Last time, one of the suggestions that we mentioned for potential hosts would be that they all support PHP applications. Though there are publishing platforms out there written in other languages, we’re going to focus on three packages written in PHP.
Drupal
Drupal is a free content management system. Its strengths lie in the built-in search-engine optimization functionality, user management in which you can define custom roles, easy theming that requires no coding, and solid documentation. Out of the box, it offers a brochure-style template which is beneficial for organizations looking to quickly publish a web presence, but infrequently update it.
Drupal’s core application also supports blogging functionality. The application can also be extended through the use of additional modules that extend its basic functionality and that provide various themes.
Notable websites powered by Drupal include the official website for the White House and the France 24 international news channel.
Joomla
Joomla is another popular, free CMS. Its advantages lie in how easy to is incorporate additional elements on the pages aside from content. Joomla makes it easy to automatically incorporate banner advertisements, polls for the audience, and contact management functionality used to gather feedback from site visitors.
The application can be further customized through community-driven efforts such as themes and plug-ins. Joomla also supports embedded blogging functionality.
Popular organizations powered by Joomla include Porsche and Nikon.
WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms available. It’s easy to install on a personal domain, has a very large community providing plug-ins and themes to help improve the site, and has built-in functionality for managing static pages. WordPress is a solid system when it comes to planning to update your content regularly, seeking to garner feedback from your readers, and allowing multiple people to author content.
WordPress offers some CMS functionality out of the box such as the ability to use a static page as the home page with the blog available elsewhere on the site, but the system is best served in an environment that will be frequently updated.
Recognizable sites that use WordPress include CNN’s Political Ticker and, ahem, ChurchCrunch.
Recommendations
Obviously, these aren’t the only three systems available. They may not even be worth considering when it comes to building your site so, once again, we’re looking to the ChurchCrunch community to share preferred publishing platforms. Leave ‘em in the comments and let us know what you use!
Alright, so let’s say that you don’t wanna use some off-the-shelf software. You’d rather roll your own site. That’s cool. One of the modern challenges facing web design today is the ability to appeal to a wide range of resolutions – some people are still stuck using 1024×768 while others have dual widescreen monitors. That’s a big margin.
In the next article, we’ll take a look at an HTML/CSS framework that makes constructing pages with mass compatibility a breeze.
[Image from Cliph]
That link should've been http://e-zekiel.com
Enter text right here!
I have to take a minor exception to your definition of a blog system vs. a cms system. In my view a good CMS allows for the creation and inclusion of dynamic content at the common entry pioints, while providing a platform for consistent "bucket" pages (static brochure-type information).
We use a CMS that I wrote in my life before being a pastor. While our system does have a blog-like component, for my personal soapbox I do have a wordpress blog and I also have started using posterous (both for their publishing ubiquity).
P.S. Since I wrote it, I am constantly updating our CMS engine, but we are underway on coding the next real version update of the CMS which will bring our components into a much more social friendly condition.
Yeah I had the same reaction ot the word "static", as in "static content". I know Tom didn't say that CMS's are static, just that they lean that direction, but when i think of a CMS I am usually thinking "dynamic content, with a plugin/extensible API".
peace | dewde
Word. You know what I mean even when I don't say mean I mean. Know what I mean?
Props to you for rolling your own system. If you've got the resources for doing that, I'm all for it. Sure, most of the other systems out there allow for plug-ins but nothing will beat the customization from building that thing form the ground up.
We use both WordPress and Joomla and love them both for there respective strengths. For a small company Joomla is easier for the 'novice' to manage.
Interesting! I've actually had the exact opposite experience. When I've used joomla or drupal to implement sites for others, the novices seem to look more befuddled than with WordPress.
Good stuff. One of the biggest issues I have with WordPress is the UI. I don't think it's terrible – it's come along way – but sitting a non-techy down in front of it for the first time is always an experience.
Each subsequent post in this series keeps upping the bar.
Great series so far guys!
Tom is money.
He can be bartered for goods or services.
It's true. I can be used as currency in some places.
Thank Danny, I really appreciate it.
I love me some wordpress and some tomsfoolery.
Another great post
WordPress.
(That's a period on the end of that!
)
ditto @newlutheran
WordPress is the best
Great article Tom. At the church I attend, we use a hosting service with their own proprietary CMS called E-Zekiel (http://e-zekiel.com). While I'm not 100% satisfied with it, mainly because of the back end UI, it does basically what we need it to do, at a fairly reasonable price. I'm not the one who gets to decide how we spend the money anyway, so I just go with the flow
.
We use WordPress for church's website:
First Hattiesburg: http://firsthattiesburg.com. Theme from WooThemes ($70 for 2 themes).
Blog made with Posterous: http://blog.firsthattiesburg.com.
VERY Cool!
That's pretty interesting. Do multiple people post to the Posterous account?
Don't take this as WordPress fanboyism (because I'm definitely not
, but curious as to why you opted to go with Posterous rather than sticking with the native WordPress blogging functionality? Either way, that's cool – I just like seeing how people leverage technology.
We had a WordPress blog for years no one used. Switched to Posterous and people started blogging from their iPhone. Plus Posterous makes it easy to distribute our content to all of our social media sites at once.
Yeah, Posterous is awesome. The marriage between email + blogging (all forms of media) works so well. Everyone knows how to do it. There's no real interface to learn.
We moved to WordPress this last summer with the intention of moving again next year to something more robust. We have quickly out grown it. We'll begin developing on Expression Engine when 2.0 hits next month.
I will say that I love Joomla and I think it gets hated on a bit too much
I use WordPress. However rethinking about Drupal for any other web sites that I might design. Joomla is better, but I felt quite inconvenient with it.
I use Joomla to manage my Web site and will probably use it to manage an updated version of our church Web site. I found Joomla easy to use and the user community provides a lot of additional features. Like some others, I use Joomla for both static pages and blog pages. I think the power to quickly render a page and quickly update the information is important to me.
I've used WordPress in the past to run my personal websites, purely for the ease with creating content, the number of layouts available is huge, and it is upgradable quickly and easily.
I'm thinking of going with WordPress for my church website, and I'm definitely interested in everyone's views on what they prefer.
Like I said, I'm tempted to go with something that I am comfortable with, but open to other suggestions.
I've been a big fan of Expression Engine. It's an awesome CMS that rocks dynamic content. Expression Engine does not fit the static definition of CMS that you explained. In general, CMS is supposed to be a "content management system". The whole reason for having content management is because you want to be able to dynamically change the content. So I don't quite understand where you got the idea that a CMS is for static content.
Expression Engine can easily support Blog creation and more. I just launched a new version of a church plant website on Expression Engine (www.veritascc.org). It's still in a growing stage, so there's still some work to do in polishing it up. But here's the basics of what I created in a few weeks on Expression Engine.
- Blog
- Information Pages (can dynamically add more)
- Sermon
- Forums
- Facebook Share buttons everywhere, including in the forums.
- Vimeo integration for Video
- Fonts served from Typekit
- Extra Audio storage hosted by Amazon S3
- Disqus Commenting System
- Automatic Twitter updates from the EE Control Panel Publishing.
- Front page can grab content from anywhere on the site and display it up front.
- Member accounts that are fully configurable to allow various levels of access to the site.
I still need to implement things like search, RSS and a few other items.
wow, thx for this!