We’re using WordPress on the Merrylands Anglican website.

The majority of pages are setup as WordPress pages through the site, and the podcasting is run via the blogging feature of WordPress. It works for us.

I’m part of an IT team that are rolling out websites for Tassie ministries. We are using drupal and enjoying its flexibility, mass of free templates and easy UI. See vision100.org, ufcutas.org and focusutas.org for some of our sites.

Over at Dundas Anglican (www.dundasanglican.com.au) we use Modx. It’s free and open source and I think it fits the bill really well.

We’re using CMS Made Simple (http://cmsms.org/) for Lanyon Valley Anglican Church (http://www.lvac.org.au). It’s been working fine for us.

Our website is built on Textpattern.

We don’t try and do anything clever with it but it is easy to use for what we do do.

We just launched Petersham Evening Church’s website: http://www.pec.org.au/. I built it using ExpressionEngine. The backend is easy to customise to make it simple for anyone to manage without giving them any control over the design.

More features will be added to the site soon.

Wow that’s quite a variety!

We used Joomla at Dubbo Presbyterian Church: http://dpc.org.au

BUT… I wouldn’t recommend it. if I had my choice over I’d use WordPress. WordPress is a LOT simpler to use and it’s all I use now.

WordPress (with plugins) can do maps, calendars, sermon audio, movies, sermon podcasts, document uploads and downloads, commenting, forums, and integration to some extent with facebook and twitter. All these are the basics for a Church website.

I also like the passion and creativity of the guys at http://automattic.com/ For example BuddyPress is fantastic (for creating a cluster of blogs round a topic) as is gravatar.com Their akismet spam system means you don’t have to worry about having a catchpa for comments. WP for iPhone works well on the iPhone. These are all from the automattic team who created wordpress – they are active and growing.

There is a good interview with the creator of wordpress (not so much on wordpress but you’ll get a good feel for the guy) here: http://ma.tt/2009/11/this-week-in-startups/

I love the look and feel of http://www.pec.org.au/

How much of that is out of the box expression engine and how much did you have to add or code yourself? How much php or html coding did you need to do to get this site going as it looks now, or was it just css and backend menus that got you that result?

For example – the photos with the little dots below them? Built in?
The sermons page with options to sort by date and type and length etc – is that part of expression engine? Can you sort by author?

Wayne

@wayne – ExpressionEngine has a similar template language to WordPress however it’s more flexible out of the box. I code the HTML/CSS and then put the ExpressionEngine template tags in, no one really uses an out of the box template with ExpressionEngine as it kind of defeats the purpose. The “photos with the little dots below them” is a jQuery plugin not a function of the CMS but the data comes from the CMS.

The media section is also custom, I have plans to add sort by author etc. however the flexibility of ExpressionEngine means there are multiple ways of how I could set it up. Starting to sound like a sales pitch from ExpressionEngine.

I have never heard a strong case to use Joomla.

WebYep

http://www.obdev.com

Advantage – similar process to CushyCMS but hosted on own server and edited on the page on the fly rather than via an admin backend.

First CMS we used was pMachine, which gave way to ExpressionEngine. Anxiously awaiting version 2 of EE, now in beta, but getting more curious about WordPress. I’d like to see easy ways to create a mobile version of any site show up in all these products.

Gosh,

I’ll feeling very behind the times.

We use an American CMS called E-zekiel. It’s nothing fancy. It does alot of what we need it to do currently. We would probably move to a wordpress style solution next given what I’ve seen of it.

We use SilverStripe.

Other than that’s what the person who set up the site wanted to use, I’m not sure why we do!

Okay, it is pretty simple, but I’m not sure how flexible it is. I know that I want to add various methods to search for sermons but not sure how to go about that.

Lots of learning ahead, I think.

We use WordPress for http://www.standys.org.au and http://youth.standys.org.au. I reckon it’s got enough flexibility to do what we need with sermons, events and forms but it’s simple enough for people to maintain when there’s no techy people around.

Use to use Joomla and found it way to complex and bloated for most people to use.

I’ve heard good things about ExpressionEngine tho.

I use Drupal on the website for the Wollongong Christian Reformed Church. It takes some time to learn, however provides great rewards: I have been able to build quite custom sermon, blogging, user management and resource system, as well as an online library system into the website.

We’ve just relaunched our church website using WordPress and WooThemes and have been very happy.

WordPress with custom-built template at:

http://www.newhopechristianchurch.net/