My Sweet Awesome Church
Due to time constraints and other unforeseen issues, the My Sweet Awesome Church project is on hold. I don't know when I will have time to work on this again.
My Sweet Awesome Church was originally intended to be a fairly detailed step-by-step tutorial about building a church website using Drupal 6. In December 2010 I did some rethinking, and decided to throw out everything I'd originally written and start fresh. I also deleted my older Drupal 5 tutorial. I planned to start over with Drupal 7, but two things happened. First, I got too busy to complete the project. Second, it is now January 2012, and I still have not moved a Drupal 7 site to production launch.
However, what follows below is a rough outline of the plan, if it ever gets back on track.
The Website
I've included a quick sketch of the website I'd planned for the original blog series. The sketch is pretty rough, but it gives us a plan to work from. I've listed three pages of content that we'll want to include, and then some pretty common features: an events calendar, a sermon podcast, the ability to arrange those podcasts into series, and a photo gallery. (We'll probably drop the newsletter idea for now, but we may add a pastor's blog instead.) Once we have all of those elements in place, we want to arrange them in such a way that we present all of these features on our site's home page.
For some info on real project planning, check out the Website Preproduction episode of the Geeks and God podcast, or visit BoagWorld.com.
Disclaimers and other notes
My Sweet Awesome Church isn't meant to reflect any particular church or denomination. My day job is in higher education, and the ideas shown here could easily apply to departmental websites for a college. I had to pick one or the other. Please do not think you can only use these instructions to build a church website. This series is about Drupal.
You may notice that the beliefs of My Sweet Awesome Church focus heavily on being sweet, being awesome, and being a church. (And sometimes on being super, as these folks aspire to someday being a Super-Sweet Awesome Church.) They don't seem very interested in what "real" churches care about. This is not intended to mock or be some sort of commentary. The idea is to remove any doctrinally specific content and focus on the Drupal techniques required to build this site. (Hat tip to Bob Christenson and Matt Farina, founders of the Geeks and God Podcast for the fictitious church name.)
Some of my friends make their living building websites like this. That's one of the reasons these tutorials are going to be a bit vague. This series is meant to be a push in the right direction. If this isn't enough to get you started, go hire a professional. On the other hand, it's not my intention to make this stuff look easier or less time-consuming than it really is. To build a really good website takes a lot more work than the overview I'm showing here. An experienced designer will come alongside your church, business or organization and learn what they need to know about you in order to make your website fit your needs. That part of the process doesn't fit into a short blog series.
Drupal™ is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.