Comments on: Deeper Into Drupal, Plus a Content Management System Rant

By: Anna Belle

Anna Belle — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:47:46 +0000

Kieran — I’m so glad you like the blog! Sorry I no longer have the time to keep it up.

The issue of people not taking charge of their content is enormous. It’s really a cultural change in mindset that has to happen.

By: Kieran Mathieson

Kieran Mathieson — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:12:05 +0000

Perhaps the biggest appeal of a CMS (for me, anyway) is organizational. Subsets of pages could be maintained by the people who know most about the topic. For example, RE pages by RE people, social justice pages by social justice people, and so on. No need to go through a nerd to make changes.

It hasn’t worked for us. Nobody has been willing to take ownership of part of the Web site. It’s seen as a specialized task for the nerd, despite the fact that anyone who can use email could manage content. In the end, I gave up, and just used the CMS to create brochure-ware. It still attracts new members, but doesn’t have any meaningful role in the life of the congregation. (This isn’t blaming anyone, by the way. It just hasn’t been something people wanted to do.)

The other problem was that the CMSs available about 2002, when this was first done, looked, well, like CMSs. They had an “industrial” look-and-feel, rather than the organic look I wanted. I wrote my own CMS, which didn’t turn out to be too hard. The site looks hand-crafted.

Might be interesting to look at churches that have been successful in having non-nerds maintain content in a CMS. What did they do that worked?

BTW, nice blog. Thnx for it.

By: Anna Belle

Anna Belle — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 13:42:38 +0000

Thanks, Scott. Me too. Here's the link again for those how might be interested. Building a Website With Drupal CMS.

By: Scott (Boy in the Bands)

Scott (Boy in the Bands) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 13:44:03 +0000

I was thinking about Geeks and God’s ten-part Drupal series which has already been broadcast and can be downloaded or heard online