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Does anyone have any experience building a church directory with Expression Engine. Looking for any tips, suggestions, etc. Thanks!
I haven't, but I'm thinking about it. Sorry, not a helpful response.
I have built a music roster system in ExpressionEngine which works quite well.
We use churchdb.org for our church directory, but it really is old and tired.
At the moment, I'm waiting for EE2.0, to be released 1 Dec. Two reasons for this, being built on CodeIgniter, someone could actually build a church directory web-app that could be integrated into EE. Also, EE2.0 will have a FieldFrame API which will make it very easy to store Church Directory type information.
I think an important question is WHY you're building an online church directory? I've never heard a good argument for putting a church directory online, as privacy concerns always come up. Is there a compelling reason for you to have a directory?
I don't know about nickdominguez, but I'm talking about a private directory for staff of the church to access, not a public directory.
The reason for having it online for staff is access.
The reason for having it online for staff is access.
That's a great idea, of course...especially for larger churches, or churches with more than one campus. 
The idea is to have a private directory members can log into and have access to other member's contact information. This would be helpful for not only member but also church staff.
If all its doing is displaying member's contact info, I'd probably use a FieldFrame Matrix with columns like Name, Email, Address, Phone, Responsibilities, etc. That or a weblog that has those custom fields in it and make a post for each person. I haven't worked with the actual member data too much in EE, but I suppose it could be done that way too, but you'd have to register each person.
If all its doing is displaying member's contact info, I'd probably use a FieldFrame Matrix with columns like Name, Email, Address, Phone, Responsibilities, etc. That or a weblog that has those custom fields in it and make a post for each person. I haven't worked with the actual member data too much in EE, but I suppose it could be done that way too, but you'd have to register each person.
I haven't built a church directory per se, but I've created staff/board pages for a number of sites and I've used both of the above methods. Personally, I prefer using FieldFrame because that way, all of the staff bios can be managed via one weblog entry. Otherwise, each staff bio would be its own entry in a particular weblog.
Last edited by opus (2009-11-05 19:14:01)