A Free Software Adventure

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a project in my spare time. This project has been a departure for me because it has been for a charitable organisation where the terms of reference have been significantly different.

I’m used to situations where the questions of cost v benefit are defined in pounds and dollars.

I’m used to working in situations where the requirements specification is reasonably well understood (well sometimes anyway).

I’m used to large scale situations.

As a diversion from all of these, this project has been fun. It’s had a life of its own and hasn’t finished yet, but I thought I would share where I am up to.

The project in question is the web site for the church we attend Fulwood Free Methodist Church.

The first question I had was this: “What is a church web site supposed to do?” We had some key aims that we wanted to achieve, but apart from two or three basic things this was a journey of discovery.

My architecture skills helped (a little) with this journey; it helped me to break the problem down into a number of different areas:

• Audience – What was the primary audience for the site?
• Content – Where was the content going to come from? What type of content was it?
• Freshness – How was everything going to stay current and fresh?
• Technology – What technology were we going to use?

It was obvious early on that we needed to have some sort of content management system and to move away from one person being responsible for all of the technology, the content and its freshness. I looked around at a few Open Source Content Management Systems and settled on Joomla. This was a few months ago and it wasn’t 100% clear at that time whether Joomla was going to take off, but thankfully it has. We already had an agreement with a hosting company which included MySQL and PHP included, so that was the easy part.

The next thing to tackle was the audience and to structure the content around the audience. We concluded that our primary audience were those people who didn’t attend, with church attendees being a secondary audience. With that we did a bit of brain storming around the type of questions that someone not attending might ask:

• What is on?
• What should I expect when I visit?
• etc.

We also wanted to make future events and important content visually up at the front.

Joomla has a concept of Sections, Categories and Items. Items are created in Categories which are within Sections. Any item can then appear on the front page along with selected modules. Modules provide added functionality like a calendar or a document management capability, or a banner. This is then all displayed in a template.

Since starting we have constructed the main site and sorted out the structure. We have also sorted out most of the content, though there is more content to come.

The next challenge was how to make things more interactive. Being a blogger I am now encouraging the church staff to get blogging. Joomla is a bit clunky when it comes to blogging so I decided to make a break from Joomla for blogging and to add WordPress into the mix. Have WordPress alongside Joomla also allowed me to put the mechanics in for podcasting the Sunday Talks.

Although very different to Joomla, WordPress has a similar set of concepts and structures.

So without spending any money on software we created a web presence that:

• Is interactive through feedback and comments
• Stays fresh with time based material
• Controlled making some information available to everyone and some only available to registered users.
• Allows multiple people to update it so I don’t have to do it all.
• Allows changes to the theme without messing about with the content.
• Continues to be extended with new components, modules and widgets.
• Supports subscription
• Supports documents

A big thank you goes out to all of those people working away at producing this software so that the rest of us get such great functionality for the best possible price.

It’s been great fun learning something new.

Go and have a look and let me know what you think www.fulwoodfmc.net.