Hi, I just started working with my church to improve their web. some decisions have been made already in outsourced support and capabilities resident with joomla and w3c products and servers. It will be a long transition as I have established a preliminary team to set and contribute to strategic directions for the cyber implementation and outreach. A couple questions though - Are there similar christian groups oriented to the joomla and w3c capabilities and applicable cyber integration? Can anyone offer some insight - pointers to handling and addressing transition and long term directions/implications between all three (joomla, w3c, typo3) major approaches - Blessings ~ Chip
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Well, if Joomla was the final decision, that's not too bad, but you're going to be building a lot of the integration yourself instead of starting with a pretty good package designed for churches. I'm not aware of a similar incentive running against the Joomla CMS, but I'd imagine that for major functionality a lot of similar packages are out there.
What you may want to do for starters is figure out what functionality you need and test those plugins to see what is needed to make them work for you. You'll also want to shell out your site's structure to get something in place, even if those pages are hidden to the public.
I played around with Joomla for a short time and switched over to the WEC solution because it was just easier for me from a Church website standpoint. I never quite got the Joomla site off the ground. However, I do know that Christian Computing Magazine had an article on Joomla a little while ago and the "Geeks and God" podcast regularly does sessions on Drupal so you could probably get some takeaways from those, even if not Joomla specific.
As for general theory, I think you'll still get some ideas here, but probably not a whole lot of technical assistance.
As for porting between Joomla and TYPO3 - I definitely can't answer that, but imagine that you'll probably have to do some coding pieces and look for a way to "hand-off" authentication between the two CMS's. The good thing is that the Look/Feel of the sites can be similar enough that people don't necessarily realize they've been passed off to a new site unless they pay attention to the URLs. I work for a company that offers web registrations and the skinning of those forms makes it look to the user very much as if nothing has changed.
I'm sure someone else will have a better tech answer than I do, but it should be reasonably possible. If you can get some ideas of what you're going to (or able to) hand off to TYPO3, I'm sure people can give you some extra pointers on what would be needed to make things work.
-Pete
What you may want to do for starters is figure out what functionality you need and test those plugins to see what is needed to make them work for you. You'll also want to shell out your site's structure to get something in place, even if those pages are hidden to the public.
I played around with Joomla for a short time and switched over to the WEC solution because it was just easier for me from a Church website standpoint. I never quite got the Joomla site off the ground. However, I do know that Christian Computing Magazine had an article on Joomla a little while ago and the "Geeks and God" podcast regularly does sessions on Drupal so you could probably get some takeaways from those, even if not Joomla specific.
As for general theory, I think you'll still get some ideas here, but probably not a whole lot of technical assistance.
As for porting between Joomla and TYPO3 - I definitely can't answer that, but imagine that you'll probably have to do some coding pieces and look for a way to "hand-off" authentication between the two CMS's. The good thing is that the Look/Feel of the sites can be similar enough that people don't necessarily realize they've been passed off to a new site unless they pay attention to the URLs. I work for a company that offers web registrations and the skinning of those forms makes it look to the user very much as if nothing has changed.
I'm sure someone else will have a better tech answer than I do, but it should be reasonably possible. If you can get some ideas of what you're going to (or able to) hand off to TYPO3, I'm sure people can give you some extra pointers on what would be needed to make things work.
-Pete
Pete, Thanks for the feedback. I intend on meeting with the joomla service provider and web host in the next week or so. Your comments have been helpful in pointing out a few specifics to ask. I am focused on fully understanding plugins, skins, templates what we get and how to add more.
Because the current site is a mish-mash of various deployments from basic asp, html to W3C most features outsie basic "CMS" capabilities are being delivered so expectations are extremely high to get all from a single package.
Thanks again, God Bless ~Chip
Because the current site is a mish-mash of various deployments from basic asp, html to W3C most features outsie basic "CMS" capabilities are being delivered so expectations are extremely high to get all from a single package.
Thanks again, God Bless ~Chip
Chip,
I'd probably focus mostly on the desired functionality. Changing the look/feel should be built in to just about everything you use if it was programmed to any sort of standard. Joomla has a decent community, but they don't have anything quite like this that I'm aware of. It's a shame in a way, because this sort of integration really is what a lot of smaller churches need - give us a starter package and let us run with it.
If you haven't done so already, I'd advise you to browse through the Joomla site and forums - they have a "getting started" forum that isn't too bad. I think they even have some form of WAMP stack that you can just run to get Joomla running on your machine without too much effort. You can browse through the extensions while you're there to see what you might need. e.g. a Media Library type extension might work very well to publish sermons, there are most likely several calendar extensions, and perhaps a photo gallery as well.
I'd probably focus mostly on the desired functionality. Changing the look/feel should be built in to just about everything you use if it was programmed to any sort of standard. Joomla has a decent community, but they don't have anything quite like this that I'm aware of. It's a shame in a way, because this sort of integration really is what a lot of smaller churches need - give us a starter package and let us run with it.
If you haven't done so already, I'd advise you to browse through the Joomla site and forums - they have a "getting started" forum that isn't too bad. I think they even have some form of WAMP stack that you can just run to get Joomla running on your machine without too much effort. You can browse through the extensions while you're there to see what you might need. e.g. a Media Library type extension might work very well to publish sermons, there are most likely several calendar extensions, and perhaps a photo gallery as well.
Author: Hello Chip: My church had a Joomla 1.0.14 website for a year and we just recently switched over to WEC/Typo3 and Vine Hosting. The problems we encountered with Joomla were that the basic package once installed did not have all the extensions we wanted or needed (Access Controls for example) and the text editor had alot of features that simply did not work. If I wanted to edit the html code I had to go to Global Configuration and switch it off the editor to "no editor", save it, then go back to my page and edit the code, Save it and go back and switch the editor on again. In Typo3 I just click on the <> and it toggles back and forth. There were tons of other nuisances with Joomla (too numerous to mention here). I lived with it for a year but hated Joomla in the end. When we wanted to add ACL to our site we decided to wait for Joomla 1.5 to see how much extra was added. Not much. With Joomla everything you want to do is another extension to add, figure out and use. With Typo3, WEC and Vine, our turn key account had it all installed for us and ready to use. Joomla comes with two bare bones templates and we had to add, pay for and customize what we wanted. There were hardly any Joomla tutorials. The awesome Flash tutorials on WEC make it easy to learn Typo3. Then there is the fact that none of the Joomla stuff is tailored to churches... I could go on and on, but you get the point. We are THRILLED to be using WEC/Typo3/Vine!!!!!
Transferring content was not hard. In Firefox I had 4 windows open. Tab 1: old site front end, tab2: old Joomla site back end, tab 3: Typo3 backend, tab 4: new site front end. Then I simply copied text from Joomla over to Typo3 one page at a time and uploaded the documents and photos I wanted to use from my home computer. Our new site has 78 pages so this took awhile. It also gave me a chance to edit and update text.
My church is blessed with some highly technical people but I'm not one of them. For the ordinary user like me, I say go with WEC/Typo3/Vine and save yourself alot of headaches. Pat
Transferring content was not hard. In Firefox I had 4 windows open. Tab 1: old site front end, tab2: old Joomla site back end, tab 3: Typo3 backend, tab 4: new site front end. Then I simply copied text from Joomla over to Typo3 one page at a time and uploaded the documents and photos I wanted to use from my home computer. Our new site has 78 pages so this took awhile. It also gave me a chance to edit and update text.
My church is blessed with some highly technical people but I'm not one of them. For the ordinary user like me, I say go with WEC/Typo3/Vine and save yourself alot of headaches. Pat
Total Posts: 5 - Pages (1): [1]