It’s that time again.
This is our weekly Q and A session with the 8BIT Team. You can ask us anything and one of us will hook you up with an answer in the coming week.
Simple, right? Oh, and did we answer your question from last week? Let us know.
The #1 Resource for Church Technology Creativity & New Thinking
It’s that time again.
This is our weekly Q and A session with the 8BIT Team. You can ask us anything and one of us will hook you up with an answer in the coming week.
Simple, right? Oh, and did we answer your question from last week? Let us know.
Free resources, top posts, and more!
John Ho says
What CMS would you recommend for a church website?
John Saddington says
depends on your needs? can you be more specific? what features/functionalities?
John Ho says
I know this is going to be vague (since I’m quite new in this space), we are looking for a CMS that is good to distribute content, allow users to change the content their own ministry pages, allows for community plugin and good community forum/support/documentation for developing custom template.
Martin Hathaway says
Your specification is wonderfully vague and gives you a choice of pretty much anything; from (non-specialist) WordPress through to (specialist) Ekklesia360 or SiteWrench Ministry.
I see that you specifically ask for good community forum/support/document for developing a custom template. In that case a cross-over service – combining a high-grade CMS with compatibility for already popular and well-supported design frameworks (like WordPress’s) – might be ideal for your needs.
My own church community software started life as a Church CMS, so I would be happy to answer any further questions you might have on this subject.
John Saddington says
thanks martin!
John Ho says
Thanks Martin. Yes its wonderfully vague and its something I am helping my church to replace our current website(http://www.subiacochurch.com). This is not my area of expertise as I work mainly in the java/jsp space and not familiar with CMS that is out there. As well as helping with replacing the website, I have been asked to look into bringing our church membership database online too. I have came across ArenaChms which looks promising and I am looking into it as it allows us to host it in Australia (rather than having it hosted in US by others on a SaaS). So this is where I stand. I am just looking at the options. It would be nice to have a all in one product, but its quite hard to find one that must meet the requirements of our church membership database of allowing for strong customised reporting – (eg finding members who have attended baptism classes but who have not been baptised, or members who haven’t attended church for the past 4 weeks). I might have to end up with two different solutions.
Martin Hathaway says
You have clearly thought through your church’s needs, and I would suggest that you are looking for a ChMS rather than a CMS.
I need to put my hands up and say that my ChMS experience is limited to my last employer (Endis Inc; maker of ChurchInsight) and attempts to build a custom, WordPress-based ChMS. Trust me when I say; the former is far simpler than the latter.
Unfortunately, I don’t know the other systems well enough to be able to say which ones will meet your specific requirements. However, I wish you the best of luck in your search.
Maybe you could feedback your findings to the ChurchCrunch guys, so that future visitors can better answer this question?
Jared Erickson says
There is not much of a out of the box solution for that but One of the big guys should be able to pull it off..
Wordpess Could pull it off.
Joomla definitely could.
Stephen Bateman says
Another week, another question:
Is there a way to record live video and slides (ala apple keynote) superimposed together.
I’m not looking for a $10k video switcher haha, more like a $0 software solution.
iChat can do it w/ iChat theater, but it doesn’t record (or does it?)
John Saddington says
What about something like Screenflow for the Mac?
Stephen Bateman says
sweet I’ll check it out.
Sidenote: I’m getting this weird cache problem on here. It’s serving a pretty outdated version of the page (~2-3 days), so it looks like there are no new comments, when there are. Might be on my end though.
John Saddington says
yeah. a few people have mentioned that…..
PhillipGibb says
What sort of source control do you use for your blogs? When it comes time to apply that theme update and you know that you have edited some of the core files – what do you use to merge the update in without loosing your custom changes?
I use Eclipse at work with CVS set up, I wonder if this could be useful in blogging – since Eclipse is free and does come with PHP and CSS plugins.
Tom says
Jared and I use Subversion (specifically, Beanstalk) for the design and development work we do for 8BIT. In my personal projects, I’ve messed around with various source control systems but end up sticking with Git or Subversion.
Lots of people rant for/against various systems and I almost went about defending my choice, but I digress. It works for us and that’s what matters.
Martin Hathaway says
Subversion +1 / I can also recommend Subversion; my specific flavour is TortoiseSVN.
I got thrown in at the deep end, learning it while working alongside an ASP.NET development team. Since then, however, I use it for everything down to PHP WordPress plug-ins and theme projects.
Jared Erickson says
I actually use dropbox a lot for my client projects.. gives me access and saves old versions.
John Saddington says
dropbox… i didn’t know it saved old versions….
Tom says
Dropbox is money for a single person, but I imagine it’d be a hassle in a team setting..
Jared Erickson says
I’m trying it out with some projects for reThink .. I will let you know
Stephen Bateman says
Feature request: 8Bit search. I can’t tell you how many times I read an article, and two days later am wondering which site I read it on…
John Saddington says
network wide search? tha’ts a great idea… i’ll look into it
Vajaah says
That would be an awesome feature! I’d love to see it too.
Eric Franklin says
I am the Campus Pastor of a Multi-site church in Central Kansas. We do our services live through streaming. We also use EasyWorship as our presentation Software. What would be the best set-up for previewing the stream before it goes up on the screen at the different campuses while using easyworship? Right now we just have one laptop at each location. Do we need more equipment or is there software that will allow this? Feel free to contact me if you need more information!
Thanks Guys, I love the blog
EF
John Saddington says
eric,
this is a great question and one that I don’t have the answer to. i’ll check into my spd guy at north point…