I’ve been in the process of designing a new website for the church I attend, the front-end interface has been needing an update for quite some time, here’s a screenshot of the old site:
The current method of adding sermons is rather tedious: You upload a sermon, then you rewrite the front page (it’s static) to link to the new sermon, then you modify the (static) page that lists the sermons by date for the year (each year’s list is static) and then add the sermon to a list of sermons by category (also static).
Because of the difficulty to add a sermon, it’s no wonder that the RSS and podcasting feeds are broken.
While doing some research, I found WordPress to be a very easy way to make a new site, especially since I found a Sermon Browser plugin!
Sadly, however, the Sermon Browser plugin has two significant flaws: 1) You can’t search sermons from the built in WordPress search, and 2) the plugin hasn’t been worked on in over a year.
I decided to use the plugin anyway, but decided that I would rewrite the plugin to use the totally awesome functionality found in WordPress 3.0 which should be released later this month.
One of the cool things about WordPress 3.0 is being able to register a new “post type”, which (for the purposes of this discussion) means that each sermon can now be a post. This means the information about the sermon can be stored and managed by WordPress, instead of needing extra database tables and needing extra functionality like in the current Sermon Browser plugin.
I already have the basic core of the plugin coded, and I’ve only spent a couple hours on it. Given my coding skill ( low) this should mostly tell you how awesome WordPress 3.0 is, since it makes such things so much easier.
Also, I think that writing this plugin will be my first major contribution to the internets.
When I release the first version I’ll make it available on the WordPress site, as well as my private svn.
I would love to see what you have done!!!
Hi Tobias,
Great idea about redesigning sermon browser to use custom post types – I would also be very interested to see what you have done :)
Also Tobias I meant to say, I helped out with a redesign of the website of the church I attend:
http://www.lvac.org.au
We also went with wordpress and had to work through similiar issues about choosing themes, working with child themes etc.
Let me know if you are keen to share ideas?
Hi, I’m currently redesigning our church’s website using WordPress, too, and have looked for a suitable way to publish our sermons for quite a while. My goal is to minimize the publish work, and I found that the Sermon Browser plugin does that fairly well. Unfortunately it has its limitations, the most annoying one of which is that it doesn’t fit smoothly into the blog concept. So I gladly read that you are working on a better integration, while hopefully still maintaining all the good things in SB. Good luck!
Regards
Carsten
Hey all, thanks for the support! I just posted an update of The Plan, you can view it here:
http://www.tobiaslabs.com/567/still-working-on-this/