Building a Church Site

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 section 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.

Most churches have a variety of programs and groups geared towards outreach, getting members together, or working to benefit charities.  The somewhat churchy umbrella term for these things is “Ministries”.  It’s always nice to give each ministry a little home page of their own on a church site for marketing, schedules, photos, contact names, etc.  In this chapter I’ll cover the implementation of the sample church site’s Ministries index page on ExpressionEngine. 

In this chapter I’ll show how to implement the weblog/comments template that will display the full weblog post as well as visitor comments.  This is a pretty straightforward ExpressionEngine implementation with the exception of creating some additional embedded templates.