A New Blog, A New Series
Yea, OK, so the world getting another blog is no big deal. In the time it took you to read that sentence at least 3 or 4 other blogs just went live. However if you are in the place of needing to learn ExpressionEngine for a project I hope you’ll be excited about the series I’m planning to break this blog in with - which will cover building a website for a church on ExpressionEngine.
Overall the approach for this series will be the same as the Building an ExpressionEngine Site - Small Business series I have on Boyink.com, so just to recap:
- I’ll find an existing template designed for a church website
- I’ll publish a series of posts to this weblog covering the EE implementation
- That blog series will remain available for free here on Train-ee.com
- The completed series will get compiled into a book, edited, and rounded out with more screenshots, etc.
- The eBook will be available for purchase here on Train-ee.com
- A print version will be made available on Lulu.com
- Purchase of either versions of the book will gain you access to the Train-ee.com forums for additional support
However - the series will end quite differently than the Small Business series. I wanted someone to benefit by actually receiving the completed site. At first I thought I could choose a church or non-profit up front but that quickly got overwhelming with the number of volunteers I had, which really put the onus on me to figure out the best way to choose from them. And - I felt like no matter which choice I made I was going to disappoint more people than I made happy.
So - here’s the new plan:
- The final site will be auctioned off on eBay, with proceeds going to a (TBD) charity.
- I’ll throw in a few hours of free training on / tweaking of the site for the auction winner.
- The good folks at EllisLab have agreed to chip in a free EE license for the site recipient.
This way the church web community gets a blog series and book on implementing a church site on EE, I make a bit of money via book sales to cover my time writing the series, a charity makes a bit of money, the market decides who gets the completed site, and someone actually gets the completed site to use.
The only downside is that since the recipient is unknown upfront, the design and implementation will have to be a bit genericized - but maybe that’s not such a bad thing considering that the series will be used by a variety of developers for a variety of churches.
So, what will this series cover that the previous series didn’t? In addition to the more typical and more static content (About Us, Ministries, Worship Times etc) this series will also cover the implementation of:
- A podcast
- The EE Photo Gallery module
- An event calendar
- A mailing list
- A staff directory
- Multiple content administrators and workflow
As before - there will be no set schedule. I’ll post to the series as I find time, roughly once per week. And yes - I know EE 2 is looming out there, and I’m not sure yet how it’s schedule and this series are going to meet. It may well be that the series will cover the upgrade process as well.
I’m excited about beginning another series - and I hope you’ll find it useful as well!
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Previous Comments
by tzTrainEE
Date: Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
Comment: #2
Nice Easter egg Mike!
Looks like another great learning resource and project. I think I will have to invest in a personal license version to keep up with this project.
Looks like a great feature set you will be teaching us how to build with ExpressionEngine.
by tzTrainEE
Date: Monday, March 24th, 2008
Comment: #3
Just noticed the Train-ee Tweets on this page/post.
So the world does use Twitter then huh?
I have to admit, I had convinced myself Twitter didn’t have much purpose. Maybe Mike brought home that little trick from SXSW 2008 ;)
Date: Monday, March 24th, 2008
Comment: #4
I’m a happy customer of Train-ee and can’t wait to buy your new series! Thanks for this great tutorials MIke.
by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Date: Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Comment: #5
This is a great series, and I am eagerly awaiting each post. Presently I have an unfinished site running on Drupal at http://www.whoisgtf.org , but I hope to transition it over to EE.
Presently, I have a gallery that users can submit photos to. Will you discuss user-submitted photos? I found this plugin from Solspace that may be of use. http://www.solspace.com/software/detail/gallery_extended_10/
Of course, I would expect users to be logged in, click an “O.K. to use this image” button and have a backend review process before the image is posted.
Just a thought. Keep up the good work.
by Mike Boyink (Author)
Date: Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Comment: #6
Hi pc - thanks for the comment.
I’ll be sticking to native EE functionality, so no user-submitted photos in this case.
by Simon
Date: Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
Comment: #1
Many churches have a need for files to be available on their site: rosters, notice sheets. Maybe that’s something you might consider for your tutorial; how to best allow users to upload files with EE.