UrbanMinistry.org
Platinum and gold sponsors
UrbanMinistry.org, which TechMission launched in April 2007, is one of the leading Web 2.0 destinations for the faith-based social services sector with partners including Salvation Army, World Vision, Association of Gospel Rescue Missions, CCDA and many others. The site is an integration of Drupal, CiviCRM, Moodle and ChristianVolunteering.org.
The site has over 5,500 items of content including a Wiki for with thousands of pages of nonprofit resources and over a thousand workshops audios and videos on nonprofit topics from partner nonprofit conferences. Site media are presented using a variety of customized node types: videos can easily be embedded from YouTube and other external services, audio can be bulk imported from the filesystem and played on an embedded Flash player, book listings can be imported from Amazon, and both blogs and wiki entries can be easily composed using FCKEditor. Most recently, we added a jobs board using the Jobs Module which uses a custom CCK nodetype to present user-submitted job opportunities.
All the content coming from TechMission, its partners, and site users can be classified using multiple Taxonomy vocabularies. Partner content is presented in distinct themes using Taxonomy Theme. Taxonomy Access Control Light restricts access to members-only content.
Users can find content quickly by navigating through the Book hierarchy in our Encyclopedia of Urban Ministry wiki or by using the Faceted Search to drill down through the taxonomy structure. Links to both Faceted Search results pages and custom Views are used to present specific types of content, such as CCDA conference audio from 2006 or books on volunteering targeted at churches. Pathauto creates readable URLs for all nodes, taxonomy terms, and RSS feeds on the site. Users may also subscribe to our media through iTunes; we use Views RSS combined with the FeedBurner module to generate podcasts with trackable subscription statistics.
Our UrbanMinistry.org Drupal installation serves content up to other domain names, including ChristianVolunteering.org, BlazingGrace.org, and City Vision College (www.cityvision.edu). Referer Themes change the site look and feel radically depending on what site users have previously been viewing.
The site provides association management system using the combined power of Drupal and CiviCRM. Membership in TechMission’s AC4 association and enrollments at City Vision College are handled by CiviMember. The site also provides Google mapping capability for over 2,000 nonprofit organizations using CiviCRM. New AC4 members, City Vision College students, and ChristianVolunteering.org are also automatically granted accounts on UrbanMinistry.org.
The site is also integrated with our online school City Vision College. Students can use a single-signon between the the Moodle course management system at cityvision.edu/courses and UrbanMinistry.org. All major course content is available for free online through UrbanMinistry.org.
Drupal’s flexibility and modular structure make it the ideal platform for a rapidly-changing community-based website like ours. From small beginnings, UrbanMinistry.org has quickly grown to become a central hub for TechMission’s programs, as well as a media repository for several prominent. The site has become integral to our mission of using technology to transform vulnerable communities.