Last time on Confessions of and Internet Campus Pastor I shed some light on the decision making process that I use and also on the first phase of that which was to collect. Now its time to process the massive stack of stuff that has been collected.

Rather than bore you with the minutiae of all the little details lets get to the stuff that the ChurchCrunch community cares about…platform choice.

During the collection phase we gathered all of the needs that we had for our website and at the same time we were collecting potential platforms that we could launch it on. I have installed and demo’d pretty much every open source CMS available to see what would match up with our needs.

Here’s the brief rundown of the contenders.

Choices:

WordPress :: Its a no brainer that this has to be on the list. WordPress appears to have the largest and most active open source community of any platform out there, demanding that it be taken seriously. Back end usability is clean and intuitive which is a major plus. It’s weakness is that it really wasn’t meant to be a full fledged CMS out of the box.

Drupal :: Drupal has a beautiful and powerful code base making it easy to work with for experienced PHP ninjas. The ‘after market’ community is not as big as some of the others out there. The back end isn’t great for the novice user. A great choice for a small church with one or two experienced web guys that volunteer to maintain the site.

Joomla (Mambo) :: Joomla has more features than anyone right out of the box which is both good and bad. Joomla has a large community and can accomplish any functionality a church would need. Training users can be a bear because there is just so much going on in the back end. Like drupal, its a great choice for a church with skilled volunteers. I will say this, if you gave up on Joomla in the 1.0.x versions, you need to give it another look since 1.5.x.

Expression Engine :: Although not open source it is pretty dang cheap considering what you get. Expression engine probably has the sexiest code base, PHP guys keep telling me that. It’s clean, powerful and uber-customizable; which may be it’s downfall. You do start with much more of a blank slate than the other options. In my brief experience with the install that I was working with I developed a strong fear that submitting content by the average Gateway staffer was going to be more difficult than any other back end I had seen.

Clover Sites :: Also not Open Source, but wicked cheap for what you get and hands down the most intuitive back end of anything out there, which is the only reason it even gets a look. It’s weakness, which made it easy to eliminate for our needs, was that it is a completely flash based platform. I think its the perfect choice for small team church plants that need a killer website and have zero technical ability, or peripheral ministry sites of larger churches (read: youth ministry)

Our Needs:

Multiple Feeds :: We need the ability for different departments in the church to syndicate a feed so users can subscribe to the information that they need.

Static Pages :: Ability to create static pages at will.

Publishing control :: We need to control on an individual basis where users can and cannot edit and publish content.

WYSIWYG :: This goes without saying.

Templating :: The ability to overhaul the design of the site several times per year.

Image Handling :: The most difficult aspect for novice users to understand in my experience. Users need the ability to upload images in the WYSIWYG interface.

And the Winner…

All that considered, we made our platform choice last week. And the winner is…WordPress!

I’m sure all of you are very happy about that.

The clincher for us is the back end of WordPress. It is so much easier to use than some of the more robust and feature rich platforms out there. Where it lacks in features, we can make up with plugins and some custom hackery. The big thing we are giving up is Menu driven structure, which just means a little more work from our web team. In the end content is king and WordPress looks like it will get us where we want to go.

We were able to pick WordPress because of two great plugins that we will use to turn it into a CMS:

Role Scoper and WP-CMS Post Control. They essentially do the same thing, with a enough differences that we need both to be fully functional in configuring who can edit what areas of the site.

What plugins are making you happy these days?

[Image from Paolo]