Building a Church Site

Continuing with the events theme, this chapter looks at pulling church event information to the site’s home page.  While I’m there I’ll also replace the Mission Statement area with the latest posts from the Weblog, as I don’t think mission statements are the best use of home page real estate - ever.  New coding approaches covered in this chapter include the use of plugins - which will allow the reuse of content while keeping the site design happy.  I’ll also use a new parameter on the weblog entries tag - the start_one parameter.

One distinct advantage of using native ExpressionEngine functionality for a church event calendar is that the event information can be pushed and pulled to different parts of the site.  In this chapter I’ll show how to display upcoming events on the Ministry detail pages.  New EE functionality this chapter covers will be the reverse related entries tag.

In this chapter I’ll cover the implementation of the Event Details template.  This is the template that will load when a site visitor clicks an event title on the default calendar view, and will display the rest of the information about the event.  New ExpressionEngine functionality covered in this chapter is the display of related entries.  In our case this will mean displaying the name of the ministry group that is sponsoring the event, and linking ministry name to the ministry detail page.

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.