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  • From: Judy Hallman <hallman AT email.unc.edu>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] In Search of a Good CMS Solution for Church Website
  • Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:16:12 -0500

I've become a Drupal fan. Drupal offers a lot of options for community participation. You can also run CiviCRM under Drupal (CiviCRM also runs under Joomla, but it is better integrated into Drupal).

CiviCRM provides basic constitutent relationship management functionality, donor management, membership management, and events management. http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/What+Is+CiviCRM gives a pretty good overview of CiviCRM.

I set up the Drupal site http://www.ibiblio.org/comphist/ for gathering information and memories that record the history of computing on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. After we get more content in it, we'll ask people (like alumni) to register and contribute their memories. Some people are already contributing content.

I haven't really used CiviCRM for an organization yet, but I follow the developers list and forums and have learned a lot from them. I've also helped some with their documentation. The developers and support team are VERY responsive. Check out some of the questions on the forums at http://forum.civicrm.org/

I've got Drupal and CiviCRM running on rtpnet.org, as NCCommunities.org and have tested hosting other sites under the one installation. I set up NCLA.NCCommunities.org as an information exchange site for literacy agencies across the state of North Carolina, running under NCCommunities.org -- sort of a private, intranet. They like it and have started building content. Any domain name will work for hosting. My hopes are that RTPnet will be able to expand its services for nonprofit organizations by offering hosting for Drupal/CiviCRM at its current rates of $100/year.

Some of us with RTPnet have been wondering if we could develop templates for a few categories of organizations, like churches, environmental groups, etc. Currently, most of the RTPnet folks are busy with other things and haven't had time to learn much Drupal/CiviCRM and we're hesitant to offer a new hosting service based only on my skills -- I haven't done anything in php or MySQL and am NOT a system administrator, though I have good backup help when I get stuck. I've wondered if there are folks on this list who might like to get involved in some kind of Drupal/CiviCRM support. I should note that I do NOT have CiviMail running on rtpnet.org. I don't think I can set that up myself.

In any case, if you'd like to set up a test site for your church on rtpnet.org, I'd be glad to help get it started, as Drupal only or with CiviCRM. Perhaps there are others who would also like to help.

Judy Hallman, RTPnet volunteer
-----------------------------

Susan LaBarre wrote:
Hi All,
I searched the IW archives and could not find any earlier postings on the topic of CMS applications.
Does anyone have experience with configuring CMS enabled websites? Our church technology team is planning an overhaul of our current website and we are looking into using an open source CMS portal for a more interactive experience. Our team has website design, CSS, javascript, and MySQL expertise but none of us has ever used a CMS solution. We are looking for recommendations on which SW to use.
Ease of use with good data security would be high priorities. We're looking at Go Daddy hosting and they offer Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, and Moodle. I suppose we could also do a manual install by our database person for any open source package. There are so many apps out there: the good, the bad and the downright ugly. Advice and recommendations would be greatly appreciated, on or offline. Thanks in advance.
Susan
*The Green Gifting Campaign*
www.green-gifting.net <http://www.green-gifting.net/>
info AT green-gifting.net <mailto:info AT green-gifting.net>
** *~a public service campaign *
*for earth friendly gift giving~*


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