Welcoming Websites is excited to announce the first, experimental release of Welcoming Websites Wizard, a content management system for Unitarian Universalist churches. The Wizard is a distribution of the popular Drupal content management system, and the software will soon be released under the GNU General Public License as a Drupal installation profile. The Wizard includes a number of features useful to church staff and volunteers, including:
- Rich text editing and image uploads
- An events calendar
- Sermon and newsletter archives
- Minister and staff pages
- Special pages for each religious education class, committee, and church group
- An easy-to-use interface for adding new pages to the site map
- Nearly two dozen pre-installed graphical templates
All of these features are available on top of the world-class content management features available in the core Drupal platform, including flexible data types and categorization systems; a powerful user management and permission system; and an extensible system for adding new functionality and designs to the system. While the Wizard gives a church a powerful platform to build a new website, it is also easy for churches to change and extend the underlying system, to meet their unique requirements. The Wizard is available for download at http://www.welcomingwebsites.com/files/uuwebsite.tar.gz. It is available free of charge. However, the Wizard is still in experimental stage; this release is meant for testing and demonstration purposes, and should not be used as the foundation for a live website. Several known bugs exist, and we will be working to correct these issues in the near future. We plan to offer fixed-price packages for installation, support, and maintenance in the coming months.
Interested users may also try a demonstration of the Wizard, available at http://demo.welcomingwebsites.com.
The release of the Wizard marks an important milestone for Welcoming Websites. We hope that this new software package will help Unitarian Universalist churches build new, engaging websites easily and quickly. We believe that the web is a powerful platform for expanding the nurturing and compassionate ministry of Unitarian Universalist platforms, and that the Wizard is an important tool for bringing churches online.
