Simple community website. CMS?

Man of Honour
Joined
4 Nov 2002
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Location
West Berkshire
Well, I've made an offer to rebuild my local church website, which in the associate minister's own words is 'beige' and in my words is 'welcome to the last century'. :)

I've never done a community style site before, and I'm very much a code monkey, not a designer - but I'll do what I can.

I really think I should follow the KISS principle - I want it to look modern, but I also want to keep it clean and simple - both to use and to maintain. That last point is particularly important - it must be easy for the church office to update themselves.

I don't want to reinvent the wheel, so I need a framework. Is there a good CMS for this sort of thing, or should I go some other route? Are there any good guides to this sort of thing - do's and don'ts, for example.

I need to find out what hosting they have, but even if they don't have what I need, it isn't a problem. I have contacts in the right places for that. :)
 
Probably going to be hard for people to recommend an CMS unless they know exactly what sort of community features you'll need to implement.

But for a simple backend for novice users to update a website, Wordpress is by far the best option.
 
Well, here's what's on the current site (beige and all):

http://www.shawchurch.org.uk/

So all that sort of stuff (which is of course mostly static content and thus easy). I'd want to add dynamic content to that - e.g. show the date/time of the next service, any upcoming church-related events, that sort of thing.

By way of example, the minister who mentioned beige also mentioned this site for another church in the parish: http://www.st-nicolas-newbury.org/. OK, that's a biased example because the minister knows who did that (family member), but sadly they don't have time to maintain two sites, which is why I offered.
 
Drupal is a popular CMS that should be perfect for what you're after, the majority of the work will be done for you in existing modules, etc. - all you'll need to do is the templating/configuration.

Have a look at the Drupal case studies for a few examples of what can be done.
 
is it possible to convert wordpress to non-blog site? lol wordpress got best/easist admin control panel

I've just starting implementing Wordpress elements into my site, and from what I can tell, you can turn Wordpress into pretty much anything you want it to be.
 
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