I have been playing with XOOPS for 3 days, and wish to verify that I am not using it incorrectly.

I am creating a website for our church community, basically an information site for the church members, and non-members alike.

I need relatively static content, like organisation information, and periodically updated information, like church events, and newsletter.

I have installed the following modules:
news : General news items to be added when required. Usually points to articles created in the content module
content : I use this to create most of the main content, then just hard link to it from news etc (content module is not listed in the main menu)
tinycontent : Used for a specific set of pages, so it lists nicely in the main menu
contact_plus : to contact us

I also intend to install:
rssfit : to podcast audio recordings

Site will be largely the same for register/unregistered user


Does all that sound reasonable? Have I missed the point anywhere?

Any criticism welcome!

Simon

Prehaps a calender module would be good doo so you can post community events.

You might also consider a gallery module - it is good for the community to see the good work members do as for example volunteers, or work with schools etc.

Did you see a ULR Jen??

Nope - this is about design...so I thought only about the design plan - a url would be good to see it though!

I also had another thought on the design plan and that is the downloads module so you can upload copis of community newsletters, and other public docs so that they can download them.

And being a church community you might want to ad a touch of spirituality by considering the bible module from wizanda. (i haven't used it but he has mentioned he has made one).

Hi Simon,

Your approach seems solid. You can check out other XOOPS sites to get a good idea of things people do and like. A few of mine are listed below; perhaps they will give you some ideas.

Welcome!

Ok, thanks all for the comments. I have not included a URL as there is very little to see just now, I will post again with that when I get something worthwhile done.

I like the suggestion about the Downloads module, that would be greate to distribute the newsletter with.

I have thought about a gallery too, but with all the child protection legislation currently I think I'll give it a miss to begin with anyhow.

Thanks for the pointer to the bible module too, I'll certainly take a look!

I have experimented with a few calendar modules, and don't really feel any fit well, and again this is something I will consider for the future. We do however publish a quarterly calendar, which I will be uploading as a bulleted page to the site

Thanks again, your input is welcomed, and I will post a URL when it is visit-worthy :)

Simon

Simon,
I have just (mostly) completed the same project. We developed a church community with the news, downloads, picture gallery, video gallery, debaser (for recordings of the sermons), icontent (for static html content), liaise, wordpress (pastor's blog), weblinks, and booklists modules (all tied together with rssfit to syndicate them). We also added a google calendar (without the logos) to the page where the church staff can change the calendar and it changes the site instantly. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you have any questions about this and i would be happy to point you in the right direction.

Matt
http://rlchome.org

PS an easy way to have pictures and be aware of child safety is to have it in the "member's only" area. With the use of iframes, it is easy to add other content if you find another open source program that handles something better than xoops.

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 Content
We 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 Resources
We 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.

Images
People 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 Happenings
To 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.

Community
We 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 here
Blessings on your work!