Why Open Source?

At Welcoming Websites, we believe strongly in open-source software development. That's why we have built the Welcoming Websites Wizard and many of our client websites using Drupal, an open-source content management system. The Wizard source code is public; Drupal developers around the world are welcome to review it, improve it, and add new features to it. Over time, the Wizard will become more extensive, and will evolve together with the Drupal content management system and broader trends in web development.

Because our source code is released to the public, congregations using the Wizard have great control over their website. They have the right to modify the source code to meet their own needs, and have complete control and documentation for the database records which control their sites.

Finally, the use of open source software allows us to give back to the liberal religious movement. The Wizard dramatically reduces the cost of implementing a professional congregational website. Congregations can also contribute to the wider movement by sharing innovations and feature improvements with other congregations and suggesting that we make these improvements available in the Wizard software that we distribute.

Why Drupal?

Drupal is one of the leading open-source content management systems in the world. It is a flexible content management system used by a wide variety of individuals, organizations, and businesses. Among open-source content management systems, Drupal has an exceptionally large and well organized community of users and developers. This community keeps Drupal up-to-date, continually fixing bugs and adding new features.

Another advantage of using Drupal is that it scales well. As your website grows to include a higher volume and variety of content over time, Drupal can help you prevent the content from becoming unwieldy. Drupal excels at organizing and categorizing content, allowing site users to browse content in a variety of ways. Using Drupal, congregations can put a large amount of content online in a way that is useful to visitors and to site administrators.

As web development trends and internet users' expectations evolve, so does Drupal. New extensions that cover a wide range of functionality (such as ecommerce, multimedia, integration with third-party services like Twitter, etc) emerge and mature rapidly. As new Drupal features become available, Welcoming Websites will look for opportunities to integrate the most useful features into the Wizard. Congregations are also welcome to modify their own Wizard websites to take advantage of new Drupal features that meet their needs.