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!