Welcome to the CofCPages.org blog. For an opening entry, I would like to talk about why CofCPages.org is here. The best place to start is with myself, the current owner of the site.
My name is Dan Watt. I started this site while in studying computer science at the University of Illinois in 2003. Up until that time, I had been a Christian at the Downers Grove Church of Christ in Downers Grove, IL. The site at Downers had been designed in a program called Front Page, which had been purchased by the congregation. The site had grown to be complicated and hard to maintain, so we switched to a different program. This time, it cost the congregation more money, and several of us took training to learn the new program. At first the site was better, but again grew complex and hard to maintain. In the meantime, the preacher and I spent a lot of time working on the site, which could have been put to better use.
I went to school, and started attending the Rantoul, IL Church of Christ. The congregation was fortunate enough to have a member maintaining their website, but after he moved, the site fell to me. At this point, I wanted to try something new, so I started working on this site.
My goal at the time was to create a site that any member of a congregation could maintain. Usually this falls to the preacher or a deacon. Not every congregation has a computer programmer, and not every congregation has a member who knows how to set up a website. Furthermore, even for the least expensive web hosting plus a domain name (www.congregationname.com), it can easily cost a congregation $100 a year to maintain a site. I was aware of some congregations that paid $3,000 to set up professional looking sites, which is great for them, but not all congregations can afford that.
So, CofCPages was born. The site was set up to allow for many congregations to share the resources available on a single web server, to set up basic sites to help their members and to reach the lost. The goal was simple: a page for ‘About Us” (a statement of who and what the congregation is), Links to other places - nearby congregations and study resources, Topics to post bulletin articles, sermon outlines and class material, and a listing of the congregation’s leadership. The site would allow only for limited visual customization - a few templates, support for adding only a few images (most importantly a picture of the building) - to focus the site on content (spiritual material) instead of flashiness.
Over the past six years, the site has grown. 40 or so congregations have come, a few have graduated to bigger sites, and some have become very active in posting material for their members. Hopefully the lost have been reached - no real statistics have been gathered in that area, though I do appreciate hearing from congregations about their successes.
Now, in 2009, the site has hit some limitations. The code that I wrote while in college is starting to show its age. The web has evolved and become easier than ever to use. Creating dynamic sites with nifty menus, powerful forms, rich editing have become the norm, but the code that powers CofCPages was stuck back in 2003. I started a search through the mailing list Brethren Online to see what congregations were using to power their websites. Many let me know that they were using some very nice CMS (Content Management System) software - including Joomla, Wordpress, and a others. As an aside, another computer person at the congregation I presently worship with, Eastside Church of Christ, runs our site with Joomla. These programs are very powerful, enabling very nice sites to be set up with what used to require $200 software, but are still too complex for smaller congregations, and any customizations that would be nice for a congregation (like a membership directory) would require custom programming.
Then I recieved an e-mail from a member, Tim, at the Fishers Church of Christ. He had designed their site, and had written some very nice software to run it. It had support for class material, sermons (with handouts and MP3 recordings), bulletin articles and announcements on the public web site. Furthermore, it had a very powerful members section. The members section has a very nice visitor card database, a family directory (surprisingly, sofware for directories of families is hard to find, where as individual people directories is very common), a discussion forum, e-mailing individual or all members, and several other very nice features. The software wasn’t quite ready to be used outside of that congregation - Tim had to manually upload files (such as sermons) to the server and fill out several forms to get data on the site, adding pages required manaully editing files on the server, but it was still some of the best software I had seen.
Tim was gracious enough to clean the code up a bit and send it to me. I have spent the last couple of months making it a bit easier for others to use, adding file uploading capabilities, adding different design templates, and adding a few new features. The software is not quite ready to be used by all congregations, but I will be contacting individual congregations in the coming weeks to start switching them. The goal is to have all congregations over to the new software by July, 2009.