Sandbox

Site: http://www.mv-umc.org
Organization: Mountain View United Methodist Church, Knoxville TN
Site mission: To create a site that engages the larger community, informs the community and congregation of events, activities, and beliefs of the church and its ministries, and that serves as discipleship to those who may be searching for their foundation in faith and Christ.

This site is extremely new to this congregation in design concept and use of the Joomla CMS. We had tried other systems - straight HTML static pages, PhP-Nuke, etc.  Nuke is too exploitable in my book, and the static html pages were too reliant on one person (me) to keep the site fresh, plus input at that time was limited to specific individuals rather than the congregation and community as a whole.  I'm hopeful that Joomla will provide an easier way for everyone to get involved.

I've added the following extensions:
JCal enhanced version
Verse of the Day
JSCookMenu
PrayerCenter

All installed easily with no big problems. I haven't been able to edit the CSS files on the menu yet (there's something causing the server to deny chmod to the files and I'm waiting on my techsupport guys to edit the cronjob that usually handles that issue for me).

The theme is a customized version of WDS Radio using most of the theme I'd originally designed for the PhP-Nuke version of the site. I hope to find time to customize some other themes in the near future, just so we can have fresh looks now and then. 

Would love some feedback, and am looking for a component or mod that would allow congregation members to do personal journaling (there was a journal option in PhP-Nuke that we renamed "GodBlogs" and that allowed users to have their own personal - or public at their discretion - journal conversations with God).

Anyway, wish us luck and say a prayer that the congregation invests in this - the third - rewrite of their website!

NativePages/Fire & Ice Designs

Updating. Since originally releasing the site, we've switched to a different them (Rocket Theme's Snowfire). It just seemed to flow better for what we were trying to do. 

Nice site.
I noticed you need a favicon.
What is the prayer center component? I would really like to use somethink like that on one of my sites.
The template looks really good.

Thank you! I like this new theme/template much better, and I really like the layout better. It's far more functional for them than what we'd originally set up. I found prayercenter at joomla.org in the extensions section. It was a fairly easy install to do. There should be a link to it's developers on the "submit a prayer request" page, I think. If not, post back here and I'll try to look it up for you.

Thanks. I found it.