As a rule, I like things that work and play well with together. It’s no secret we are an ACS shop. A big part of that is the support department, the other is the tie in between their online member offering (AccessACS) and their web CMS (siteExtend). As a CMS, siteExtend is the easiest I have worked with because of the way the back end is laid out. Everything is listed in a series of “cabinets” or “managers”. There’s one for content, one for media, one for channels, etc. The handling of local and global CSS and JS files is the easiest I have worked with so far. It’s a nice piece, but where they really shine is in the linkage with AccessACS. You can read about how we used that to streamline our Elder meetings and reduce paper costs here.
This is all driven from your local database. If you have a group, it doesn’t matter what the group is, you can create a private “channel” on your website that you can then populate with various information. How does it look? It looks like this:
As you can see, it is pretty easy to set up the private channel. Once you create a new small group, activity, class, etc. and do an upload, it will automatically become available within Extend. In this case, anyone who is a member of the Activity Group Leadership>Current Elders and Staff can log into the private channel. Once they are removed from that group, such as an elder rolling off their term, their login will no longer work for that channel. You can go all the way down to the “fourth element” in an activity group, which in this example would have been Leadership>Current Elders and Staff>Hospitality Commission>Fall Festival Committee>Chairperson. Yes, you can get that “granular”. You can also create a channel that is as wide as available to anyone with an AccessACS login. No matter what group they are in – or not in.
When churches talk about integration between our websites and our groups, we generally think “How can I get a list of groups on my site.” which results in some type of iframe or “finder” device. But, if you are going to use your site as more than a “digital brochure”, and there are content pieces that you don’t want to out and around….or worse yet – PRINT. How are you going to do that? There is some information that your members or regular attenders may want to see, but it really wouldn’t be appropriate for a visitor or someone checking your church out. How would you do that? Could you set up a channel or a whole group of channels tied to logins in less than a minute?
ps. We did set up a wiki site for our budget and controlled the login via Extend.
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