Building Open Source Catholic
Just FYI, you can read through a series of postings on Midwestern Mac to see the details of how this website was designed. But I'll summarize things in this post, for those who would rather get the five cent version:
The website is running on a content management system (CMS) called Drupal. This allows for as many users to contribute tons of great content to the website, without having to use a program and programmers to sort through all the information.
The theme (which creates the basic look and feel for the website) was designed by Jeff Geerling during the weekend of the 2009 Catholic New Media Celebration in San Antonio, TX, and will eventually be posted as a free, open-source theme on Drupal.org (the theme will be named 'Airy Blue').
The website is hosted on a shared account through HostGator, and requires a few basic software packages on the server: MySQL, PHP and Apache. All the software used for the creation of this website was 100% free—let me repeat that: not one dime was spent on the tools that make this website tick. Obviously, the site involved some time investment to set up... but once set up, there are no royalties to pay, no software upgrade costs—nothing.
Any questions about how the site was set up? Please ask in the comments!
Comments
This is the first comment ever made on Open Source Catholic. Let it be remembered forever as the comment that started it all. There will never be another comment quite like it. Now that I'm finished speaking about this glorious first comment, I will stop typing, quite abruptly.
Advancing the faith.
This is the first comment ever made on Open Source Catholic commenting on the first comment ever made on Open Source Catholic. May it be remembered forever as such.
@MatthewWarner - well, I could continue this ad nauseam, but I think that would be a poor way to start this thing off!
Advancing the faith.
Ha, fair enough. But the site looks awesome! Nice and clean, sharp looking, and it's gonna be very useful! Thanks for setting it up. I'm looking forward to participating!
Thanks, Matthew - you know, if you create an account, you'll be able to publish comments without having them moderated, you can create an avatar, and more ;-)
Advancing the faith.
"All the software used for the creation of this website was 100% free—let me repeat that: not one dime was spent on the tools that make this website tick."
And that's exactly why I'm starting to have a deep interest in PHP and mySQL. =)
Was Jesus a PC? I sure hope so!
Oh, yeah. I love Open Source!
It's not necessarily super-easy at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's just as powerful (if not more powerful, since you hold the source in your very hands!) and much, much cheaper than a paid solution.
Advancing the faith.
How do you like Drupal as opposed to Joomla? I've been using Joomla on some Catholic projects, but I'm thinking of switching to Drupal. Great to see this website out there. Too many diocese still dont believe in the internet yet I guess - would be nice to see some content driven sites.
Matt K: Drupal has a lot more community-oriented features and design out of the box, whereas Joomla seems a bit more oriented towards people who are coming from Dreamweaver, and want to keep a more rigid/corporate structure-style to their sites. There are some new contributions to Joomla that help somewhat, but as a core, I'm a little more pleased with Drupal at the moment.
Advancing the faith.
For me personally, I'm trying to stay abreast of the big 3...WordPress, Joomla, Drupal.
They each have their own niche strengths and I think for a full-time developer/designer it might be wise to be familiar with each. In addition, those 3 are chewing up market share like crazy, so the odds are high you may end up working on a site running one of them.
Like I mentioned in another post, all 3 of those CMS developers are benefitting from the competition...which is good for us to!
Thanks for the feedback. I am a spare time web developer so I try to keep is small. I have heard Drupal performance is much better, and I was wondering for a diocesan newspaper site if Drupal is what people are using now.
People are using whatever they need to use ;-)
Drupal can be very fast, and has a lot of high performance support (it is used for Fast Company, The Onion, and all the Warner Brothers artists, as well as some other big-name multi-million pageview sites... but you still need to configure it correctly :-)
Advancing the faith.
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