Have you ever architected a church community site? This is a task I am taking on for a new project. A basic architecture for a community site is pretty easy to throw together. Sites like myspace (ugly and bad example but still an example), yahoo360, facebook, and many other give an outline for that. In the church arena mychurch.org is a great example.
But, there are some major differences between these and this project. First, those are for massive amounts of people who are trying to create communities within the greater community. This project is for just a single community. Second, there sites seem to be more about socializing and gossip than working together towards a purpose which a church site would be about. Third, these sites seem to be individual focused rather than community focused.
Mychurch.org and fraternitylive.com are the sites that come the closest to what I am looking for but neither quite fits the bill. Though, they do give a great starting point for an information architecture.
Note: This is for a community driven site and not the main church site. There will be a separate main church site with info about the church, the pastors, the podcast, and all that other stuff.
Here's my first pass at an information architecture:
- Homepage - This page would contain post that have been promoted by privileged users from other parts of the site.
- groups/ministries - A directory of group and ministries from the church. Each group and ministry will have it's own section with it's own events, calendar, posts, polls, and wiki pages. These groups/ministries can be public or private and might be a small group, project working group, ministry, or any kind of group a church might have.
- master calendar
- planet - this is a blogroll of blogging members.
- photos - this is photographs from the members of the church from things happing around the church and of the members of the church.
- coffee talk - this would be a group that's just for general conversation. my initial thought was a forum but a coffee talk groups should suffice.
- get involved - a page with information on how to get involved in the community. From the different groups, mailing lists, and all that jazz.
You'll notice use profiles aren't listed here. There will be user profiles but they will be minimal. The center of this site is not users but groups and the community as a whole.
I can see a pastor reading this with a whole bunch of concerns. So, let's address some of these up front.
- The blogroll. Am I seriously thinking about putting members blog posts on the site? Yes. This is about community and not power or control. It's about people and not corporate leadership. To handle problems in this area there will be moderation and a policy on what cannot be posted. Oh, and having a blogroll like this has been done by a number of churches before. This is not close to breaking new ground.
- But... you said the center of this is the community. Shouldn't that be God. Yes, God is at the center of our lives but this is not a website about teaching but about community. Teaching takes place in the church but that is not the goal here. This is about living out Christian community.
- How do photos add to community? Well, look at flickr and all those other photo sharing sites. We as people, for the most part, are visual people. A picture speaks a thousand words.
- How will people find a particular group or ministry? Trust me... they will.
There are a few other elements that are in this site that I have not figured out how they will play in to the layout. They are:
- About Us section - this will point to the main sites info and maybe add some detail if needed.
- Announcements - there will be an announcement (church wide) section/list on the site.
- Vistiors - there will be something for visitors. A link, a page, something to make the site easier for them to navigate.
I'm sure there are questions, concerns, and comments. I'd love to hear them. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?
Modules?
I assume that you want to set this up in Drupal. If so, what modules would you adopt for the features that you want. I'm going to try to set up a Drupal site for my church's youth ministry this summer, and I'm looking for ideas. I've already set up the church's main site (Elston Family Church) with Drupal, so I'm looking forward to going at it again.
yes, drupal
Yeah, I'm going to build it in drupal. I am not exactly sure of the modules other than organic groups. I'll let you know when I build it in September sometime.
Write-up?
This sounds like a fascinating project, my old church went down these lines and setup a collection of groups - Whole site was a custom write by a Postgrad student as his project.
One of the useful features it had was that each group had a file repository where they could share files. This was very useful for our housegroup which could use it to share notes and things.
Now you could just do this by adding files to nodes, but a file repository might be worth considering.
The fundamental problem this site had was no-one used it! The church body just wasn't ready or really interested... So after a few moths of a few of us trying to desperately get people involved it died a quiet death.
That said I still think it is a fantastic concept, and in the right church with the right people it could be a great resource!
I would be very grateful if you would consider documenting the process you go through, to help the rest of us!
Andy
Will Document
I have the same reservation with people using the site. One thing that we have is that the main site will just be an outreach site. There will be just some basic things like the podcast, information about the church, a list of groups, a really really basic calendar and that's it on the main site.
Now, this is a medium sized church with a lot going on and the current site has more than that. People seem to want more than what's already there. So, there is a certain segment already interested. But, only time will tell. I expect some groups, like the youth and mens ministries to use it more than groups like the prime timers (over 60). That will be something to track.
As for architecture, I will document things as I go and post when the site launches.
Have you checked out Lightstogether.com
It's still very new, and eventually will have a youth version called fxluniverse.com Both show some good potential and seem to be able to much what you're looking to do.
Thanks for sharing your ideas and thoughts.
Thanks and no
Thanks for the link but this is not at all what I am looking for. This site seems to be about groups from churches connecting with each other. I am looking for just connecting withing the same church community.
While this is an interesting site with potential there are a lot of major issues with it. Here are just a few:
I won't talk philosophy here. They have a lot of technical things that need to happen for the design to be good. Based on design alone I would not recommend it.
Add a media page
I've been considering whether to volunteer to move our church's current website from Dreamweaver/HTML to Drupal. It should be done; it's a question of who has expertise/time....
Though your architecture is about the community site, I suspect the following comment would apply to both a community and "main chuch site."
When I compare your architecture with what's currently on our site, I see one glaring omission: Media.
We record every sunday sermon, and within 3 hours it's on the website for somebody to listen to. They can listen in-line (e.g. link to MP3 file), or listen via iTunes. We just do sunday audio now, but we've had lots more media, e.g. videos made by church members of missionary trips, etc. Currently, this doesn't live on the site, but could.
I can imagine you might want a media section in your community site, too, where people can post audio/video, etc. I can imagine a need to create Drupal content types for use in this process, and views to provide listings.
I'll keep an eye out here; if you're going to do this, it might reduce the work I'd have to do on our site sufficiently to sign up to do it.
Thanks for thinking this through.
-jb
on main site
Hopefully we launch the main site soon. Still waiting for the final thumbs up from church leadership. That site is set to have the podcasts and media on it.
How would you organize media into the community site?
When I look at the community site isn't about people and not the content. So, organizing the content is based on how the people will work and use it. The idea is not to be a media site. In fact, this is about God and His people. We need to be careful to not have media come first but the people and His word.
So, media will be integrated in there where appropriate but it's not going to be a big deal. There will more media on the main site with podcasting and some other stuff.
What kind of media would go well on a community site?