We've been using XOOPS for our church site for the past 2 years and we've been spending a lot of time on concept and design appropriate for our members and also for outreach. Here's how we have applied various XOOPS modules -
Mostly-Static ContentWe converted all our static html pages to Wiwimod pages. Wiwimod has the ability to publish pages for various groups and maintain earlier revisions of each of the pages. You can create an entire site just using this module.
Printed Documents and Other ResourcesWe still create printed publications - announcements, bulletins, newsletters and more. To make these available online we use WF-Downloads. Again, the flexibility of making these available on a group basis allows us to provide select content for various user groups.
By adding RSSFit we are able to provide our recorded sermons as a podcast.
We use the original MyLinks as our web links module - links to other churches and organizations, as well as some of the other ministries we partner with.
ImagesPeople like to see pictures. We use a gallery to contain those images and we can use those in other modules, too. We have been using XoopsGallery, but we are planning a move to MyAlbum-P because of its integration with the system imagemanager. Showing photos of youth and members has not been a difficult thing for us to deal with. We have a privacy statement available, and we do not identify anyone other than staff.
Events and HappeningsTo keep everybody current on happenings at church and in the community, we use a combination of modules - News and PiCal are the ones we selected for this. PiCal has recurring events and has the ability to import iCal files/urls so we can update from our desktop application. It also allows you to set group permissions for viewing and submitting.
In addition to providing our printed publications for download, we add each article individually in News. Again, we use the group permissions here and throughout the entire site.
CommunityWe use CBB for our forums to allow people to pose questions and join discussions at anytime. It takes a while to get this going and we our use is mostly for discussions surrounding the development of the site by the web team.
We make extensive use of the Formulize and Formulaire modules. We use Formulaire as our contact module because it can send an email to a staff person based on the user selection on the contact form without making the email address available for spam harvesters. Formulize is used for all our online forms and surveys. We have even created a prayer request form that allows anonymous submissions and members can submit their stewardship pledges online.
There are a lot of great church sites based on XOOPS out there, just use the search here and you'll find lots of resources. There are even companies that use XOOPS to provide sites for churches.
Another thing we have added to our site is Scripturizer - a little javascript that adds links to any Scripture reference it finds on the page. Just upload the script to your site, include a link to the script in your theme header and let it do the work! You can get it from
hereBlessings on your work!