Distributions

As some of you have already gathered, I'm developing a Drupal distribution for church websites.

One of the early decisions I would like to make is whether to require users of church websites to use their real name. I feel usernames give a false sense of being anonymous and have a tendency to encourages internet flame wars or otherwise cause people to act less composed then when they use their real names. In addition, church websites should be extensions of their physical communities and real names help easily associate virtual users with their physical counterpart.

A Drupal Distribution for Churches has been a long time coming. There has been plenty of discussion threads and podcasts regarding this topic.

This page exists for planning purposes. You can add feature suggestions, tutorial links, module suggestions by editing this page directly. From this information a Installation Profile will begin to emerge with the most basic features first and more advance features in the future.

Features should be listed by priority. The most important features should be a the top and the less important features (things most churches could survive without) should be at the bottom.

It seems the variety of options to create some sort of distro or feature set or pattern or template or whatever are broad, but one thing that is united under all of them is the need to collect a list of what sort of features should be included in this. So what features do you think every or most church websites should have. Let's stay away from modules, how it would be accomplished.

This is a question about defining the problem. We can figure out how to solve it later.

Our church is going to re-do their web site and I sold them on doing it with Drupal, so I am now charged with the task of making it happen :)

I thought I'd create a discussion on g.d.o. that would document my process in a way that might help others as I go along.

Okay, I say lets do it. There seems to be need and interest, and a reasonably well defined list of basic requirements to get started. I'm gonna start with this post as a basic list of requirements, and go from there. My basic list of modules is there as well. I've started a basic profile and gotten the following modules to use:

audio*
bloginfo
calendar*
cck
coder
contact_list
dblclick
event*
focus
forward
front
image*
logintoboggan
og
paging
panels
pathauto*
simplenews*
upload_preview
views*
views_bonus

(Reposting from my comment on Dries blog post about Drupal Distributions.)

The Drupal Distribution Profiles group is nice, but what about creating an entire Drupal Distributions website?

I have created several church sites using Drupal and am offering my customized Drupal bundle for others to purchase.

The bundle can be seen at www.churchplantingjourney.com. The bundle includes all of these features and can save you hours on configuring your site.
* Prebuilt Pages (About Us, Contact Us, Ministries) plus unlimited potential
* WYSIWYG Editor - Easy editor like using MS Word!
* Calendar with repeating events
* Allow sign-ups for events
* Audio files: post sermons and songs online