Building a Church Site

With the ExpressionEngine calendar functionality explained, let’s dive into the code.  In this chapter I’ll cover the implementation of the Event Calendar index template.  From a coding perspective I’ll show how to do the basic implementation, and then use an embedded template with embedded variable to get around the “no custom field” limitation of the weblog:calendar tag.  This chapter will also lay some groundwork for using EE’s relationships to tie events to ministries.

Most active churches will have, at any given time, a number of special events going on that need to be communicated to members and potential visitors alike.  From a facilities perspective often there are large meeting spaces that need to have an availability calendar so members planning an event know when a particular space is available.  ExpressionEngine has some built-in calendaring capabilities that can, at times, meet these requirements.  In this chapter I’ll provide an overview of the EE calendaring capabilities, talk about it’s strengths and weaknesses, and cover some options to the EE calendar.

For any potential visitor using a church’s website to help make a decision of whether or not to attend, a Beliefs section is pretty important.  Getting the corporate church beliefs posted on the website can also focus members on them in a way that’s not possible otherwise.  In this chapter of the Building a Church Site on ExpressionEngine series, I’ll cover the implementation of the Beliefs on the example website.  From an ExpressionEngine perspective there is nothing notable about this chapter save for the speed at which it can be done - there isn’t any new ground here as far as coding approaches.

In this chapter I’ll cover the ExpressionEngine implementation of the Worship section of the example church site.  From a content perspective, the Worship content will live in one place and be displayed on both the Worship page and the site’s home page.  From an EE perspective, the build approach will cover nesting two EE tags to accomplish the content formatting required.

In this chapter of our series, I’ll show how to implement a detail page for each ministry in the church.  The detail page will provide a place to display contact info, show a photo, have paragraphs of text, and allow site visitors to leave comments. From an ExpressionEngine perspective, this chapter is very similar to the weblog comments template, but I will cover a new use of the weblog:entries tag to show related ministries to the one being viewed.