Dear faith filled friends of Drupal,

I work with new technologies for the Diocese of Plymouth, UK. We are contemplating an exciting project to move our Diocesan website onto a Drupal platform. We would like to not just use the website to present some content to the world, but to really model who and what makes up our Diocese and to use the website for e-learning, crm, event management & booking, and with the ability to have a parish website sub-site network that has an integrated user database and events calendar.

We are very keen that the ecclesiology and theology of the diocese is considered right to the very low level of the system, i.e. that even the structure of the database reflects how we think about ourselves and the church. And in fact I quite fancy using MariaDb over MySql only for that reason.

So the website would be used as an internal tool for the diocese itself.

Does anybody know of any diocese’ using Drupal for their websites? (I know there are plenty of parish websites done in Drupal)

Does anybody know of any organization using drupal for e-learning (we do short courses in Catholic theology)?

We want to use the system for something like CRM (contact management), but to use the Users table as the base entity for a person, not to have seperate contacts table. Any thoughts on that?

I think with some collaboration from others around the world we could create a Drupal for a Diocese distribution that could be reused by any diocese.

On a specific technical note, I am not sure whether to represent the entities of Parish, Deanery, Church etc. as just different ‘content types’ or whether I should create new ‘entity types’. Any ideas?

many thanks

Jonathan