Description:
St. Ronald Catholic Church is a catholic church located in Clinton Township, Michigan that is part of the Archdiocese of Detroit. This website is the third website we have created in the past five years, and is the first website to use an in-depth CMS system such as Drupal.
Our first website, created in 2005, was originally a one-page HTML website that was hosted on a “sub-folder” (not a sub-domain). This website existed until 2007, when work began on our previous website; which coincidentally was a customized version of the Joomla Content Management System. However, the administration area of this site was very difficult to use, since it was not from the Joomla system; which is why we ended up moving to the Drupal Content Management System.
Key Features of stronald.com:
-Staff Directory
-Service Times
-Bulletins
-Bulletin Articles
Why Was Drupal Selected?:
Drupal was selected as the “main-frame” for the new website because of its easy-to-use administrative area, along with the ability to add contributed modules for additional components. I’ve used Joomla and WordPress for other sites, but they are both hard to use, and you have to have experience in order to manage them. With Drupal, I learned how to use and had it setup in a matter of minutes.
Process of Building the Site:
The process of building this site took a total of four months, and included many different planning sessions with various people and groups. The process first started in August 2009 when discussions began that we had to “expand” our current site, which at the time was being hosted on a sub-domain address (which was not being indexed by the Google Bot). After I volunteered and was chosen to undertake this huge task, I first met with Parish Administrators in order to determine what features we would like, what content would be moved from our old site, and what new features were we looking for.
Once the content planning was finished, we started preparations on designing and determining what the look and feel of the site would be. Since the colors Red and Gold were used on our previous site, we decided that we would try to go with a variation of Blue, Red, and a few other colors. I originally intended to build a custom theme, but instead (in order to save some time), I decided to customize the “Black Mamba” theme. It had the necessary regions that we were looking to use, and it had the right look and feel already, with the exception of a few “minor” CSS changes that I would make at a later date.
Phase 3 ended up putting together the first two phases, into one gigantic site. We asked that every group submit content for their respective “sections”, but instead, we only received information from a handful of ministry groups. In order to stay on track for a January 1st, 2010 release, we decided that we would build pages for the groups that did not turn in information, and that we could add it at a later date. After building the site to a point where we could take it live, the necessary testing was completed to make sure nothing was missing; and then the individuals who are responsible for content editing were put through some training in order to use the site.
We are currently in the process of designing the custom home page; adding an Image block to each page; implementing the ability to stream masses and events on the site; posting Pastor sermons to the site; and several other features that we are currently in the “planning” stages of. With the streaming of masses and events on the site, we would most likely use LiveStream since it is free, but we are still working on the details for that. I’ll be sure to post another case study for that.
A couple of days after the site went live, we moved our “Religious Education” website onto the same multi-site install, upgraded the theme, and modified some of the navigation structure. This multi-site installation runs 5 websites, including the websites for the Parish website, Department of Religious Education, our Videos website, our Vacation Bible School website, and our Community website. The first two websites are online, but the other three are still under development.
Technical Implementation:
The production Drupal site is hosted on a Dell PowerEdge 1750 server running a Drupal 6.15 multi-site installation, with 4 GB RAM and 130 GB RAID virtual drive. An installation of Menalto Gallery is hosted on the same server, and is configured as a Virtual Host on a sub-domain. Backups of both the Drupal install and the MySQL databases are taken every other weekend, in case of any hardware failure; and are stored both on-site and at another data center hosting facility.
The development Drupal site is hosted on a custom-build server, running on an Intel Xeon processor with 8 GB of RAM and 1 TB RAID virtual drive, separately from the production side. This server is also hosting other Drupal website installations, and both Drupal installations and MySQL databases are backed up every other weekend in case of a hardware failure.
Design Development:
When we first began development of the website, we used a customized version of the theme Black Mamba (http://www.drupal.org/project/black_mamba). However, after a month of the site being online, our visitors using earlier versions of Internet Explorer (especially IE6) began having issues, such as pages not being “sized” correctly; among other issues.
After looking through numerous posts on the issue queue, it was decided that, with a new pastor coming in effective July 1st, it would be best if we developed a new look. I quickly designed some mock-ups using Adobe Photoshop CS4 (not the easiest to use since it was my first time); and I believe that this new custom look will improve our online presence. More information on this process will be available at a later date.
Modules Used:
In all, we have over 80 modules enabled and in use on the site. The modules below are just a select list of them.
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