New Hope Church Site: Updated

Okay, so I'm announcing here the first mini-launch of the New Hope Church web site. The site is now running on a later version of Drupal and should have most of the old features intact, with a very few additions. I need to get the login information to Eric so he can start on the theming now so we can have the full launch.

I'm most excited right now about the new features that are coming rather than the few I've added. I'm going to talk about both and the features we already had as a reminder.

Existing Features

The New Hope Church web site has featured these capabilities to date:

Blogging

Any staff member or ministry leader in the system has had the ability to create a blog within the site. However, a very limited set of members have been given the appropriate permissions and of those, they generally have blogs elsewhere or not at all.

Comments

Any authenticated visitor to the site may add comments to most of the stories, audio messages, and events on the site. Again, however, this has never been used. It has never been advertised and I don't know if anyone has noticed the comment links since the current site design works to hide them.

Contact Forms

Each staff member has a contact form on the site. This was the only available way of contacting staff members during the previous iteration because I never implemented a better way. The main problem is that the contact forms require registration to work.

Events

This was one of the most heavily used features. The only serious issue with this was that recurring events weren't possible, so we couldn't add events like the Fusion youth meetings or Sunday gatherings unless we wanted to add each and every occurrence. I don't think anyone on staff has that much time to spare.

Messages

This is the single most used feature of the site. We upload audio to the site and then visitors can read notes about the sermon, download the audio, and listen to Podcasts.

Map

There is a map on the site showing the location of the old church office, Flint Hills Christian School where we meet for on Sunday, and the location of our land. Unforunately, an IE bug I documented a while back keeps that from working properly for anyone using IE.

Notifications

Staff, ministry leaders, and administrators (i.e., me) can setup email notifications when the site changes. I originally use this to watch for when Tony uploads the audio and to check back to make sure things were working. However, I confess that I've been simply deleting the notifications lately.

Pages

Various informational pages have been placed on the site. So far, this isn't much used, but I think that we'll see the amount of information on the site increase over time.

Biographies

Each staff member has a bio on the site associated with their user page. Any member of the site may also have a biography. More information could be added to the member profiles in the future, but I have no direction on what kind of information folks would like to see.

Search

The Drupal search abilities were a little pathetic in 4.5 and 4.6, but it looks like things are quite a bit better now in 4.7.

Announcements

In addition to events, some announcements don't have a specific date associated with them. These are heavily used in the current system and this should continue.

Categorization

Currently, categorization is only used to differentiate between which announcements and events belong to which ministries. With this update I've replaced the original categorization system with a different system that I think will serve us better.

Throttling

The site does have some throttling capabilities. That is, when it starts to see heavy loads, the site will start disabling some features of the site to keep it from being too overloaded. I've not configured this very well yet, so it probably needs to be looked at some more.

TinyMCE

No one visiting the site needs to know HTML. All pages can be editted using an editor with a Word-like interface.

Upload

Staff and ministry leaders can upload files to the site to associate them with stories, pages, events, etc. Unfortunately, our hosting service limits uploads to under 10MB, so this doesn't always serve us very well.

URL Filter

All documents on the site will automatically convert unlinked URLs and email addresses into links. This is also meant to simplify how the site is used for the non-tech-savvy.

Okay, that's what we already had. Now, on to what has been added.

New Features

Here's the list of new features that I've added with this update of the software running the web site.

Categories

I've switched the system from the "taxonomy" plugin to the "categories" plugin. One of the main reasons Drupal is popular is it's "taxonomy" system which provides a very rich language for describing metadata. Metadata, in this case, is basically just extra keywords associated with any particular page on the site.

For example, an announcement might have a taxonomy term associated with it named "Announcement" in the "Section" vocabulary. It might also have a term of "LIFE Groups" associated with it in the "Ministry" vocabulary. Each term is a particular keyword and each vocabulary is just a set of related keywords. The taxonomy system is very nice, but it has a shortcoming in that you can't describe the terms themselves very well. For example, what are "LIFE Groups"? What is a "Ministry"? These might be legitimate questions we'd like to answer and the taxonomy provides only a very rudimentary solution to this problem. I used some weak solutions in the previous version of Drupal to address this problem, but they didn't really work very well.

With the latest version of Drupal there's a new module called, "Categories" that promotes each vocabulary to a first-class citizen called a container and each term to a first-class citizen called a category. Each of these have the same full power as a regular web page and can contain a full description of what they are. This is a cool enough feature, that I will probably start using it on this web site soon. Kudos to Greenash for pioneering this.

Repeating Events

This resolves the old problem of not being able to have recurring events on the calendar. We can now create an event for Sunday morning worship and then make it a recurring event that repeats to a certain date. Handy.

Feedback

In addition to the Contact forms already in place. I've now added three new feedback forms that do not require creating an account to use. This will surely mean a little more spam for those of us on the receiving end, but that's not easy to avoid. There's now a form that is kind of an online "white card" like we pass out in church, a form for prayer requests, and a form for site problems.

Google Analytics

The chuch site has started collecting more statistics about visitors to help us improve the content of the site. I used Google Analytics because it's free, though, we've had some worries about it's accuracy at work. I'm hoping it will be better than nothing.

Just in case, I have also added a couple other stats modules to Drupal as well, to use Drupal's built-in statistic gathering capabilities to track things directly from the site too.

Google Sitemap

The site will start generating a Google sitemap, which should help improve how our search results show up in the most popular search engine.

Menu

This is a de facto improvement that comes just with upgrading 4.7, but we can now create much nicer menus in the system than we could before.

Automatic Path names

No more "node/123" links! I've added this in to automatically create easier to read and link paths within the system. Anytime someone joins our site, they're user profile will be at "user/user_name" rather than "user/123". Similarly, whenever an event is created, it will be at "calendar/2006/08/13/some_event_name". There are still a few irritations to work out of the names being generated, but I'm much happier with the way this is working already. By the way, the old links still work too, so they won't be broken either.

That's what's already new. Now on to the stuff that I think's going to be freakin' cool.

Upcoming Features

Here's my wishlist:

Google Map Improvements/Location/Geocoding

I've already started playing with this a bit. One thing a lot of folks have asked for is an online directory. I've been thinking about how to do this and I think I can provide an online directory for members that will not compromise anyone's privacy.

In addition to providing a directory, I will be able to provide a map showing the map location of all our members on a single map. So, you'll be able to see how close you live to fellow New Hope members. This will probably include a more public way of publishing LIFE group and event locations as well.

Forums

I would like to add forums to the site. Drupal 4.7 now includes the ability to create a pretty decent forums system directly in site. I think we could have various forums for things, particularly site suggestions and problems. This will be combined with my next item...

Organic Groups

This is a feature added by the CivicSpace crowd to allow members of a Drupal site to create groups on an ad hoc basis. With some controls on the system, we could allow staff members and ministry leaders to create mini-sites in the system with their own stories, events, audio messages, forums, etc. I see this as being a really exciting feature for the web site with the potential to revolutionize the communications abilities of thte staff and other leaders.

Okay, that's not the full list of what I want to do, but that's plenty long enough. It will probably take some weeks before any of the latter bits are implemented and I'm still looking for and waiting to hear bug reports on this latest update.

Cheers.