My Church and WordPress

May 3, 2007

Some churches use blogging applications like WordPress for their entire website and others (amazingly enough) use them for their original purpose – i.e. to blog. At my church, though, we’ve adapted Word Press to function as a super-simple content management system. Really it’s just an announcement board for committee chairs and staff. We’ve done this for at least three years, and it’s been quite successful.

The main reason our blog-cum-announcement-board works is because some of the church’s leaders wanted something like this. We’d actually tried this kind of technology a couple of years earlier, but it never went anywhere. You need someone aside from the usual tech suspects to be a catalytic agent. Our secret agent was the then Chair of the Social Concerns and Action Committee. She begged us to give her something so she could post announcements on the web. Once we set it up for her, she jumped right in and others followed suit.

It would be even more successful if the webmasters did more training of key people. Maybe now that I’ve graduated to Web Diva I’ll be more attentive to our stakeholders. However, we do have detailed instructions for newbies.

How We Set Up WordPress

We chose WordPress because one of our webmistresses was comfortable with it. I’ve installed it before for myself, it’s flexible about having multiple authors with varying degrees of control, and it’s fairly simple for them to use. Also, over the years, I’ve learned the rudiments of WordPress theme design. I designed this one – code name “Fire of Commitment.” You are welcome to download and install it.

• Fire of Commitment WordPress Theme (zip file)

We have WordPress and all its files installed in a separate folder. Periodically I update them. That’s my least favorite part of this setup. If you are even more averse than me to that flavor of geekiness, I’d recommend using WordPress.com or a web host (like DreamHost) that does it for you.

Then we parse the RSS feed and pull the headlines and blurbs on to the church’s home page. Actually, most people in our congregation never look at the blog directly. They just scan the home page. If you wish to parse an RSS feed, use something like Magpie RSS. Once you have a parser in place, you can also pull other feeds. That’s how we grab the associations’ headlines.

Do other churches have non-standard uses of WordPress or other blog apps, I wonder? If you have a moment, let me know.

Posted in: Church Websites, Content