I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle a couple of dynamic sites, both for churches.

Here's some of the information that I have received:

• The site will be dynamic with information changing week to week.
• The site will have different sections that represent different ministries of the church which is run by different people.
• The site will have downloadable sermons, audio and text.
• The site will have a private section or sections (like a phone book of the members which will only be available to members).

As you can see, that will take alot of management. So how would you manage that?

1. Would you do it all yourself and make all the changes every week?
2. Would you use FTP and give the separate ministries their own separate logins? (Which might be dangerous if they know nothing of FTP or HTML.)
3. Would you use a CMS and give the separate ministries their own separate logins for their sections?
4. What else would you recommend.

I'm afraid that most of the people in charge of their ministries (which are like pastors, youth, food pantry, schedules, etc.) know nothing about anything on sites except how to visit them on internet.

Comments?

Dave

If it were me, I'd go with the CMS and let them do their own input and updating. Taking it on yourself would become a nightmare and just chew up a lot of time.

Some of the onus for educating their people on how to use the CMS has to be on them. I'd train key people and then maybe provide some kind of support for a short while until they get the hang of it -- and make sure they have readily available documentation.

I'm thinking along the same lines. You may have noticed that since I put up a poll about member's choice of CMS. You can vote here.

Dave

Yes, I saw your poll, but I don't use CMS systems so I couldn't really vote because I don't know anything about any of them

Dave -- I don't believe CMS would be the way to go for your situation ... have you considered PHP/MySQL Databases?

Nowadays sites have to change constantly and provide up-to-date news; information; stock prices; customized pages; etc ... PHP and SQL are two ways to make the site dynamic.

PHP is a robust, server-side, open source scripting language that is extremely flexible and is also cross platform, which means your PHP scripts will run on Unix, Linux, or an NT server.

MySQL is the standard query language for interacting with databases. MySQL is an open source, SQL database server that is more or less free and extremely fast, not to mention is also cross platform.

Originally Posted by travelagent

Dave -- I don't believe CMS would be the way to go for your situation ... have you considered PHP/MySQL Databases?

Yes, I have thought about that. My reservations are particularly around the other people that would be maintaining/adding/deleting/updating their portions of the site.

Dave

Dave and Travel Agent,
I don't know what the difference between CMSs (like drupal and joomla) and PHP/MySQL Application. Coz both use PHP/MySQL

Joomla by default has these user roles
1. Registere - Submit Content
2. Editor - Edit content
3. Publisher - Approve Content
4. Manager - All above 3
5. Admin
6. Super Admin

Drupal by default has these user roles
1. Anonymous
2. Registered Users
3. Super Admin

But with Drupal you can create many user roles and give access-permisison, maintain permissions, etc. May be you can do with joomla too with additional modules. But to me, Drupal seems more flexible than joomla.
Hope this helps...

I'm not sure how this guy does it - but I attended a class he presented and he said we could contact him with any questions about his site. He built and manages his church's site which has alot of the components you mentioned. His site is: http://www.svdpsf.org/ and each ministry updates their own information.

I work for a church and we're currently trying to figure out the same thing... currently we have one person who makes all the changes/uploads, etc. and we're trying to figure out how to 'share the load' with a few others. We just asked our congregation for people interested in helping and then our webmaster asked specific questions about their experience and abilities. I know there's about 5 members meeting this week with the pastor to talk about the next step. [the site that we have is www.ctrcc.com and we're at least wanting to update our grapics].

good luck!