My Church and WordPress
Posted by Anna Belle on 03 May 2007 at 04:02 am | Tagged as: Church Websites, Content
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.
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We’re looking at a major overhaul starting somewhere over the next twelve months, but I’m wondering if we could use Wordpress as an interim solution. (And if it works well enough, a permanent one later.)
Seems like most of the work would be in organizing the categories and static pages. Then figuring out permissions.
I was looking at these themes yesterday. I’m wondering if you know of any other made-for-churches Wordpress themes?
It’s a 2-way street: you need non-geek* users to get it started, but you also need English speaking geeks to articulate the concept and provide the support. If I was one, Anna Belle, you were most certainly the other.
Let me also add that our blog is very user friendly. I appreciate the fact that I can play with it and find different ways to use it without blowing anything up. (This was moderatelt true of our first blog, and is much more so of this one – whatever the technologies are…)
* I am indeed a nerd, but only a geek wanna be.
So saith the the “then chair of the Social Concerns & Action Committee”…
Daisy
Dearest Daisy – How you make me laugh. I’m so glad you confirm my sense that the blog-cum-announcement-board is user-friendly. This, I suspect, is related to what Chance is considering. Speaking of which….
Dear Chance – Since you are doing a great job with WordPress already, I’d say yes, consider it seriously. I didn’t go into the details, but we use the categories to help populate other pages in the site, such as Adult Religious Education (ARE). If a blog post is marked as ARE, it will also display on the ARE page.
For permissions, the webmasters are “Administrators,” our programmer and editors are “Editors” and every one else is an “Author.”
I don’t know of any other religious WordPress themes. If I construct any, I’ll be sure to post them on this blog.
Thanks, both of you, for the great feedback.
Wow… My church is starting the process of launching a website. I never thought about using wordpress for the church’s website. My blog is under livejournal.com, and I have set up another blog under wordpress, because I see it’s better than livejournal. I haven’t had the time to transfer yet. Anyway… thank you for the post. Do you mind if I contact you about websites when I have more questions?
moxie_mocha
Please feel free to contact me about using WordPress for your church’s site. I’d be glad to help if I can.
[...] One side note: blogs, because of the unusual ways they are accessed, are a somewhat different beast. FeedBurner is generally considered to have the best statistics for blogs. But that’s beyond the scope of this post, since church sites aren’t usually blogs – even mine where we use WordPress. [...]