Church CMS/MODx CMS - Advice

Quote from: splittingred at Feb 05, 2008, 09:45 AM

Hey dude, I know that it’s great that things are coming up for church ministry and such, and I’m sure that your product has a ton to offer...

...but don’t you think it characteristically un-Christian to go onto another product’s forum and promote your product? The story in Luke 14 about not sitting at the honored seat of a table seems applicable here.

Shaun
blessings

Shaun,

Well, I am not sure what it means to you to be "un-Christian." But I was trying to help a person who has a need. That seems like a Christian thing to do. Also I did not put down MODx at all. It sounds great. But in this case, the issue is one of practicality and applies just to the specific case of church web applications. And the truth is that there is a lot of work needed to recreate what Web-Empowered Church has now. So, it does not seem "un-Christian" to me to bring that up. It is just helping people like the other posts here. If we are honestly trying to help people then it seems fine to share what seems best for them. Thanks for your efforts on MODx.

God Bless,
Mark
Director of the Web-Empowered Church

Quote from: ChurchCyberGuy at Feb 05, 2008, 12:15 PM

Shaun,

Well, I am not sure what it means to you to be "un-Christian." But I was trying to help a person who has a need. That seems like a Christian thing to do. Also I did not put down MODx at all. It sounds great. But in this case, the issue is one of practicality and applies just to the specific case of church web applications. And the truth is that there is a lot of work needed to recreate what Web-Empowered Church has now. So, it does not seem "un-Christian" to me to bring that up. It is just helping people like the other posts here. If we are honestly trying to help people then it seems fine to share what seems best for them. Thanks for your efforts on MODx.

God Bless,
Mark
Director of the Web-Empowered Church

Mark,

Sure, I would agree with you on your wanting to help - I’m definitely not saying that was wrong in any way. What I am saying is the way you presented it was, well, a bit deceptive, a bit arrogant, and a bit disrespectful of the community here. Whether you meant that to happen is not the issue; I don’t hold it against you, but I do think that you should know the way that it did, good intentions or not, offend the community here.

Let me further explain:

1) When you say "they have a team", you imply you’re not a part of the team. However, as it was soon found out, you are the director. This is called deception. I have no problem with you saying, "Hey, I’m the director of WEC, and we’ve been working on a product that might help." But saying it like it’s someone else’s so that your cred can be improved? That’s deception.

2) You said "that you could never catch up to". That’s really arrogant. How do you know?

3) You started promo-ing Typo 3 on a MODx forum. That’s disrespectful. If you would like to promote the product, get out of the way of it. The product can speak for itself.

4) "For churches, there is no other effort that is even close to what WEC is doing" - again, are you sure? I’m sure there’s churches that have something similar in-house, or elsewhere. I know personally ours (which uses MODx) fits most all our needs. Be careful with what you brag about.

5) RAYF3 in his first post said he had tried WEC, but rejected it because he didn’t want to use Typo3. You completely ignored this statement, and went on promoting anyway. You missed his entire question.


I hope that helps.

Shaun

Sorry to cause conflict. That was not my intent at all. Honest, I saw a Christian guy who has a need that can best be met by a solution other than a massive MODx development. Everything I said was accurate. I have nothing against MODx. It sounds like this community is not open to that sort of discussion or perhaps you are not open to Christians. It is your community and you set the atmosphere and the rules, so I’m fine with not discussing it any more here. I wish you the very best on your efforts and congrats on the CMS award.

Mark

Shaun,

I apologize. Please feel free to kill this part of the thread if you feel that it is inappropriate for this community.

Blessings,
Mark

Quote from: ChurchCyberGuy at Feb 05, 2008, 12:36 PM

I apologize. Please feel free to kill this part of the thread if you feel that it is inappropriate for this community.

Apology accepted. I’m glad we believe in a Gospel of grace, not of a record of wrongs.

I hope you and your product do well, and I’ll pray for blessings on your new development into the new Typo3 version.

Shaun

Quote from: splittingred at Feb 05, 2008, 12:47 PM

Quote from: ChurchCyberGuy at Feb 05, 2008, 12:36 PM

I apologize. Please feel free to kill this part of the thread if you feel that it is inappropriate for this community.

Apology accepted. I’m glad we believe in a Gospel of grace, not of a record of wrongs.

I hope you and your product do well, and I’ll pray for blessings on your new development into the new Typo3 version.

Shaun

Thanks Shaun!

I blew it because I was typing too fast (lots of e-mails and things to take care of) and focused on helping, and of course I am pretty excited about what we are doing. I should have thought more about my choice of words and the community I was posting into but I was moving too fast on my todo list. My mistake.

Hey, I checked out your church website. Great work! May God bless your efforts there.

Mark

I haven’t had much time lately to follow-up on my post, so now I am. First of all, thanks to everyone that posted to help. The information is useful.

We are still reviewing our final choices of what we will build on/with, but it looks like we are doing he following...

To house all of our membership data (local/worldwide members) we are going to use People Driven Software LIVE. We’ve been with this company for years now... their original product was based in MS Access (nightmare with 50,000 entries), but they just released their latest product (PDS Live) which is all web-based and now runs on SQLSvr. Also, it was originally built for, and still is driven by church databasing needs... lots of features. (note: PDS Live has only been revealed to existing customers, but will be made public on their website in mid 2008)

For our website(s) we will obviously be using MODx. (no explanation needed)

For our commerce we are looking at using Magento... has a lot of great features. It’s still in beta, but it’s a promising product with a bright future. We have close to 500 products so the scale Magento works on matches our need.

And we will most likely be hosting it all at www.mediatemple.com , which I’ve heard other MODx users have used and had minimal to no problems with them. They also have a "how to install Magento on mediatemple server" tutorial, in their blog. On top of that, they have many reputable companies that they host.. so it seems like they have a great reputation.

Again, I just want to thank everyone for their input and post what we’re planning to do incase others are looking for the same.

-Kevin