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Description: This is the website of St. Paul's United Methodist Church of Brick, NJ. We are a family of Christian believers excited about being a part of what God is doing in the world and in our community. We invite you to visit us to see if the rich Spirit of Christ we are experiencing meets your needs as well. The pastor, staff and church leaders at St. Paul's are committed to excellence in ministry. We are servants and imitators of Christ, eager to share from the rich abundance of His blessings.Case Study: The stpaulsbrick.org website was started in 2005 as static webpages that were maintained by one person. By 2008, because of the time required to continuosly update these pages, the site was failing to meet the needs of our church. St. Paul's Church has many missions and ministries that were not benefiting from the power and convenience of having their church web site report the news of their events and activities. Also, the static site did not represent the church well in its outreach to new members or the community.

To change the website into one that meets the church's needs we began to investigate using an open-source content management system for our site. The system needed to feature:

- An event calendar system that could support many complex repeating events
- The ability to play, download, or subscribe to the podcast of the church's weekly audio message
- The ability to classify articles to specific missions and ministries
- Allow multiple users the ability to post content or create events using a WYSIWYG article editor
- Provide reliable driving directions
- Uploading and posting of the church's periodic publications in the pdf format

After testing out other content management system, Joomla was selected for creating the actual site because its combination of core functions and available extensions satisifed all the site requirements. It was also easier and more reliable to administer than the other CMS's we tried. Finally, its very active community of users and developers gave us confidence it would be supported for the forseeable future.

Joomla's ability to classify articles by section and category provided a structure for the site's navigational hierarchy that matched the needs of the church's ministries and missions. The adjustable multi column blog layouts built into Joomla provided a new way for St. Paul's to present many announcements on one page. Particularly popular is the ability to throw the most important announcements onto the frontpage in a blog/news site style. The resulting frontpage very much resembles a dynamic version of the church's Sunday Bulletin.

Also, Joomla provides St. Paul's with the new feature of syndicating its frontpage announcements using the News Feed module. Now subscribers can get the most current church news without having to search through all the older announcements.

To meet the new sites requirements, the following extensions are being used:
- JCE - enhances the Joomla WYSIWYG editor
- JEvents - provides us an event calendar that is packed with repeating events
- SermonSpeaker - allows us to add mp3 sermons for downloading or playing, and a podcast feed.
- DocMan - allows for posting and categorizing our pdf publications
- SWMenuFree - animates the standard Joomla menu system
- XMap - provides a sitemap tree for users and search engines
- JRedirect - allows complex dynamic urls to be simplified to one word
- Google Map API - customizes driving directions from google.

We our currently using the rhuk_milkyway template that comes with Joomla with some minor modifcations.

We will be evaluating the Bible Study extension for adding more features to our site. We continue to experiment with other extensions to see what features they offer for our site.

It took about three months of testing and learning Joomla and the extensions before we were ready to switch the site over to the new system. After the switch, we learned that many churches in our area were using a system called the Web Empowered Church, an open source turn-key package that runs on the TYPO3 CMS. It comes packaged with many features that churches want. However, most of the WEC sites look alike because they are built around a common design. Our site, with its news/blog style frontpage, stands out among this crowd. We have already received positive feedback from a neighboring church asking how we did it. It's possible that our Joomla based system will provide an example to other churches of an alternative the the WEC/Typo3 system.

We hope to continue to work on the site's appearance by getting more pictures and graphics onto our site. We hope to eventually produce our own template that will better capture the St. Paul's experience. Therefore, we expect stpaulsbrick.org to continue to serve the Lord by being an excellent resource for our members and the community.

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Comments (1)
★★★★★
What a showcase
byMikeClay on January 31, 2012
This site is an excellent example of presenting relevent information. The section on Web Software is just icing on the cake.

Thanks for all of your work

--Mike--
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