Here are a few details about how we created this website:
Platform:
We chose WordPress µ for insidenorthpoint.org for several reasons:
- Using a single installation simplifies our administration of all of the different areas of the site.
- It’s very simple to add a new blog, so when we have a need to add a new area, it really is just a few mouse clicks.
- It is a lot easier to utilize the same theme and plugins across all of the blogs.
- A single user administration area simplifies things and allows for granular control of user permissions.
- Some of our ministry areas are very interested in blogging, while others really wanted more of a standard website. WP MU allows us to provide either one or both.
All of these are pretty much “WordPress µ 101″ basics, so it was a fairly obvious choice. This was our first site using WP MU, and our experience has been very positive and we will certainly consider using it for future projects.
Design:
One of our goals for the design of this site was to provide a common structure throughout the site, yet allow each ministry area to brand their area of the site as they wished. We chose to base our design on the Fresh News theme by Woo Themes. It provided a lot of great features out of the box, and we were able to customize it pretty easily to suit our needs. The design is based on the Grid Design pattern and uses a 16-column 960 grid as its foundation.
Functionality:
For the most part all of the areas on the site use standard WordPress functionality. We did add a few common WordPress plugins to make it easier for our ministries to embed videos, collect stats, etc., and we even wrote a couple of plugins for some specific needs. If you check out the Branding & Promotion pages in the Group Life area you’ll see a Flash video thumbnail gallery that we created to allow our Groups team to embed several videos on a single page.
If you have any specific questions about the site just let us know.
April 29th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
I would like to know can you make some of the videos be able to post to facebook, I was listening to Pastor Andy on one of your pages and I wanted to share it so I copied and paste the link and it came up as the whole website. Is there any thing that I can just have the video, something along the lines of youtube. Your website is really good to by the way. Great flash, and the whole set up is good not to confusing and very user friendly interface. God bless you Russell look forward to your reply.
FBC of Downtown Jacksonville Florida
April 30th, 2009 at 7:37 am
Lidia -
Thanks for the comments. We haven’t provided any way to link directly to videos since this isn’t just a video site like YouTube; however, I can certainly see why you’d want to share some of the videos directly, so we’ll look into this.
Thanks!
May 13th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
It sounds like you coded the flash video gallery yourself. Any chance you could share that (like a plugin)?
Everything looks great!
May 14th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Nick - thanks for the encouragement I needed to publish this as a plugin. It’s been on my to-do list for a while now, but managed to stay at the bottom. I’ve packaged this up as a plugin called FLV Gallery and posted it to the wordpress site at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flv-gallery/. Try it out and let me know how it works - it’s my first stab at a “real” plugin, so no guarantees!
May 14th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Hey Russell,
Thanks for posting it. I won’t get to try it out for a little bit but I’ll let you know how it goes when I do.
May 22nd, 2009 at 2:15 pm
I was wondering if i could get some help on learning how to use your flv gallery plugin?
Also, could I embed videos from my own rtmp server?
thanks so much
May 29th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Pls provide Wordpress support for the FLV-Gallery plugin that Russel Todd of Northpoint wrote. There are many Wordpress users that are asking questions on how to implement the plugin your site uses to watch FLV videos. Proper documentation is kindly requested. Pls email me instructions on the coding for this plugin & re-release the plugin to the Wordpress.org website. Thank you.
May 29th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Paul & Steve -
Thanks for your interest in the FLV Gallery plugin. I have just updated to version 1.1 and added a bit of detail to the documentation. Please download the latest version and / or check it out on the WP plugins page, then let me know if you continue to have any problems.
Thanks again!
July 15th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
What domain host do you use for this site? I’m going to be starting my own WordpressMU site soon and want to know which is best for this kind of thing. I use Bluehost for my personal WP blog and that seems to be working just fine.
July 16th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Graham -
All of our sites and applications (both external and internal) are hosted at RackSpace. We were previously at a co-location facility here in Atlanta, but we found ourselves doing too much server and OS maintenance, which are not core strengths. We’ve been very satisfied with their “Fanatical Support” and the switch has met our goal of allowing us to focus on the things we need to focus on.
For more information check out our infrastructure page.
July 16th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Thanks Russell! That infrastructure page is a big help.