CMS for my church (non-techy users)

Howdy, folks!

My church is considering a site redesign, and I have been tagged as one of the folks who can help them do this.

The staff are mostly non-technical.

I run WP blogs all day long, no problem. Some simple, others a bit more complex, depending on the plugins used.

I'm a little intimidated by Drupal or Joomla...only had a VERY cursory glance at them.

What I basically need is:

- a SIMPLE site, with a few pages, clean design (templates would be nice)
- varying user-level access. Let the youth pastor change his page, but not the main page, for example.
- support for audio streaming
- very user-friendly. ie: a non-techy user logs in, makes changes to the content, and saves it. Done.

Any suggestions for which CMS we should use? We were recommended to use Cloversite, which is a flash-based ministry-targeted CMS. It looks great, but because of the Flash, it's not SEO friendly. (the content of the pages isn't searchable, for example). In addition, it's one password to edit the entire site. Meh.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

 

I would say stick to wordpress if you know it.... its preety easy for non techies to get to grips with.Just assign the right user priveliges so they cant install / delete plug ins etc.

 

I would definitely stick to wordpress. It's one of the best tools when it comes to create an extremely nice looking website that's clean. I would stick to it. I've created some websites with wordpress, even one for my karate club. Take a look at them: gigantiskpenis . info
billigaconverse . com
nyabella . se
killarsombloggar .co.cc

 

I don't see a way within WP to allow user1 to edit one particular page, while user2 only has access to a separate page, without having access to all the pages.

 

use joomla.

it has a better and easy interface.

 

It probably depends on what you are looking for. There are a huge range of options and maybe it depends on how much time and effort you want to personally put in to long term supporting the site. For my own church we opted to use church123.com. Couldn't be happier with the decision. They have all the features we need built in and provide the user access you mention. The support is fantastic. Even if you dont use their system they have bag loads of free tips on building church websites so worth a look.

PS I'm not saying it's a more sophisticated system that Joomla but it will be a lot less work and probably provide all you need.

 

You should also look at the Soholaunch Website Builder for Business. It is an easy to content management system. It allows you to assign varying levels of access to your admin users, it's more SEO friendly than a flash based design. The interface is easy to use and the drag and drop page editor is nice too. I can't post links yet, but you can google soholaunch to get to their website.

-Chris

 

If you use Wordpress, you could always set up the site for your church and teach people how to update it. Another option is using WP Remix or something like that that pegs itself as Wordpress as a CMS.

 

If I recall correctly, there's a thing in wordpress where you can create users. I'm the admin, and I can create a user called pastor. The user pastor then logs on, and does whatever he wants to, except for editing the main page. I think it's supposed to work like that...

 

actually you can assign user to a (example) MEMBER category, and their spesific page as a POST that belong to MEMBER category, so every user have personal page (POST) that can be update.

hope help.

 

I would recommend you to use Joomla for such a website with the requirements you provided.

 

My question to you is: Does your church's website necessarily need to be SEO Optimized? Usually Church websites are more for members than non-members anyways. Plus what is the church for except to spread the word....(of Christ and the Website )

So that said, Clover site's are pretty awesome looking...

 

I would stick with wordpress and dig up a framework/template that is geared more towards running a site v. a blog. There are tons of them here http://themeforest.net/ that are all quite nice looking.

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

I recommend that you go with wordpress - its easy to use, light weight on the server and you can create limited user accounts for more authors.

If someone wants to post stuff on the site, just create them a authors account.

 

Based on your described needs, I'm tempted to tell you to seriously consider Website Baker (http://www.websitebaker2.org/). I've used it before for self-described "techno pagans" and so far they're been running it for around three years or so now, all on their own with no further need of help.

It's the "little CMS that could". Written in PHP/MYSQL, and completely Free and Open Source, so you can host it yourself on just about any Linux server.

Several themes are already available here:
http://addons.websitebaker.org/pages/templates.php

Also, a lot of modules to further extend functionality:
http://addons.websitebaker.org/pages/modules.php

One neat thing about this CMS is that a top-level administrator within the system can create custom user groups to really control who has access to what by controlling what "modules" that group has access to.

This CMS by no means is anywhere near as robust as WordPress or Joomla, and I'd recommend either of those two if you are going to have a large, participating membership. But, it's at least an alternative if you don't need that kind of power.

 

You can try Websitebaker it supports all your basic needs
Website Baker is a PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) designed with one goal in mind: to enable its users to produce websites with ease.

 

Stick with what you now. Stuidopress has a nice theme "Church" based on their Revolution series of themes.

http://www.studiopress.com/themes/church

 

Well,

For your church you may just want to have someone make it for you. For example a church site I know of http://www.pembrokebiblechapel.com had theres designed by a techie person.

Or you can opt to go with Lanius CMS, deployed on my sitehttp://www.siblinks.net
Works quite well for the non-techie..

Luck
Bozonessinc!

 

Joomla should do the work. Although wordpress would be much easier to setup.