I have just unleashed a new version of Adelaide Place Baptist Church website using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS).

The original apbc.net site (well, actually version 2 or 3) was hand-crafted using PHP over a MySQL database, and seemed to work reasonably well.

The site maintained bespoke database tables for content, user management (we maintain a private contact list) and rota management (to manage the rota for each week’s worship service). There were a few problems with cross-browser viewing, mainly because I was not strict enough in my use of CSS, but it was becoming time-consuming to maintain and extend the site.

Motivation

The whole idea of converting to a CMS was spurred on by an article on Heal Your Church Website.com in August, that discussed the merits of WordPress versus other CMS for hosting a church website. WP seemed to come out fairly well, and as I already had experience of using WP for this site, it was a reasonably clear-cut choice. I considered other CMS possibilities (the usual suspects as specified in opensourcecms.com: Mambo, Drupal, PHPNuke etc.), but many of these are fairly heavyweight content-driven applications intended for enterprise or large community sites, rather than for a relatively static church site. WP has the right scale for the type of site I needed to build.

Building

The design and implementation process was relatively straightforward. It was easy to port across the content from the old site to a new Page structure in WordPress. Date-bound news articles were converted to the more blog-like Posts.

A few pages required hand-crafted PHP code – such as the bespoke rota pages, and management of the viewing of private sites. This was helped by the EzStatic plugin, that allows inline PHP within a WordPress page or post.

We maintain a private contact list for viewing by members of the congregation only – this was enabled by the Usermeta and Userextra plugins, that allow additional metadata to be held for each registered user.

Layout and design used the WordPress themes, which are all based on templates and CSS. I adapted Becca Wei’s nice Almost-Spring theme to incorporate a header picture.

Summary

In summary, the main advantages of using WP, for the apbc.net site, are:

• Ease of editing for non-technical authors – I wanted to extend authorship to several other people;
• Increased ability to extend the site using plugins, rather than having to hand-craft all the functionality;
• Built-in publication using RSS and Atom.

I’m looking forward to extending the site now using additonal plugins – I have my eye on a plugin for an event calendar. If I get some more free time, I might have a hack at writing a WP plugin for church rota management!

The experience has been interesting, and I now have a different opinion on hand-crafting code. It is much better to adapt existing frameworks, particularly those in the open source domain, and to concentrate coding effort on truly bespoke functionality, or on integration. I need to take this message into my day job as well.