How-To

I'm trying to use Drupal V6 to create an online directory (user list) of church members with pictures, contact info, interests, etc. Membership security access is required to view this info. This is pretty easy when I've got an email address to go with each member. But I'd like to include those in the listing that aren't on the net, for the benefit of the other members. Has anyone dealt with this issue, and how did you solve it? The problem revolves around Drupal requiring a unique email address for all users.

I had to add an online donation page to our website recently, and didn't have a lot of time to do it. Instead of trying to learn Ubercart, I thought I would just write the bare minimum that we needed to get going. I had some experience with authorize.net from a project a I did about 6 years ago, and thought what we wanted would be very simple. Alas, Authorize.net had changed things around a bit and my solution didn't turn out quite as nice as I had hoped (It takes 2 pages before you get to Authorize.net).

What have you come up with for repeating dates and calendar management as a whole?
We used CCK+DateField+Calendar for a long time, but eventually changed to simply embed a Google Calendar on our site instead.

http://www.gracecommunity.ws/event

The biggest hurdle I think is the general interface for working with the calendar.

GCal: click on the date/time you want to add something and start typing,

Drupal:
- remember where the Add Event link is
- figure out what fields to fill in
- remember to select the date and time (with the correct time zone)

I wast just noticing the hCard module, http://drupal.org/project/hcard, and was wondering what the rest of you use for your church sites to cater to search engine interests. hCard seems like it may be a step in the right direction. I know PathAuto can be helpful in this. What other tips might you share?

Rob_Feature has put up a potential session for drupalCon DC (in March in Washington DC) on building church websites with Drupal. If you're going to be at DrupalCon, consider registering and voting for the session.

http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/building-church-websites-drupal

So you've heard that you should use Drupal for your church website, but you're not really sure to begin. You look at the Drupal website, and you see all kinds of download choices, with modules and themes, and you're trying to wrap your head around all of these concepts, but it just isn't quite clicking for you. What you need is a simple analogy for how all of these pieces work together.

The other day, Bob Christenson posted a question on Twitter about development versions of modules.

Anyone know of a way to track new official #drupal releases(not hackish, unusable dev versions). The problem is, not all dev versions are bad

Since the question affects a lot of topics we've been discussing in the Churches Group, including conversations about building install profiles, I've decided to write about it here.

I haven't done this myself yet so I shant comment. In trying to figure out what sort of questions a church new to using drupal might ask, I happened on this one. "How do you do a sermon podcast?"

Perhaps those actually doing this could share their version of drupal, the modules they depend on and any other tip that might be appropriate in helping others complete this task. This will help us build up resources for others to get started. It might even be a good start towards the case studies we'd like to build up or be something we could start formatting into a wiki page.

I have just put together a Page for our newly forming young adults & professionals small group: http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com/node/28

This is not a "singles" group as is far too common because I don't believe that they are healthy.

This is an Intake/Welcome/Invite-a-Seeker-or-Drifter ministry which may lead to a larger culturally-relevant celebration service with spin-off groups.

That context stated I'd like to put a background or a watermark on the page to make it more interesting, either a picture of our own new Holy Grounds Coffeehouse or something generic.

Last week I started the challenge to upgrade <a href="http://testedgroup.com" target=_blank">my custom zen sub-theme from zen 5.x-0.7 to zen 5.x-1.0 which has taken a couple more hours effort than I had originally expected. The outcome so far however was worth the effort. Thanks JohnAlbin and contributors.

With the excellent documentation, I have decided to start and modify my frontpage from the traditional river of news to display NODE-X that wraps around BLOCK-X displayed on the right hand side of the content. Now I have hit a barrier and I need your input...