One of the things that the YWAM International Chairman’s Team is working on is to improve the communication inside and outside YWAM. It is a part of the mandate to “heal the nevous system” of YWAM.
After a disussion I had with some other members of the YWAM ICT I setup a simple YWAM news site. The goal for the site is to help communicate what is happening around YWAM to anyone who is interested.
The site is built on WordPress, a free open source CMS / blog engine. I used Google Feedburner to deliver the news via email because it was easy and free. There are many different free themes available for use with WordPress, so I played around with a few and finally settled on the one that is currently running on the site.
To help with the functionality of the news site I added a few WordPress plugins to it. Most are available for free (all the plugins I used were free) and are easy to install on the site. I’ll put a list of my current plugins, the template and the other resources used for the site at the end of this post.
Right now the site is really more of a prototype or proof of concept news site. Trying to gather stories by myself is a very time consuming job (hence why there is not too much up there). To really make the site or concept work would require either a lot more time on my part, or more people doing it. I would also want the site to do more than just aggrigate the news (Planet YWAM already does some of that), there needs to be some editorial work involved, and a simple script or plugin can not do that.
Have a look at the YWAM News site and tell me what you think.
Here is the list of resources, plugins and the template that I used:
CMS / Blog Engine
Template
- WP Premium theme by WP Remix – Nice and clean theme with the e-mail subscription built right in. Available in three different colour variations.
Plugins:
- Contact Form 7 – for contact, feeback and submit story form
- Dragon Design Sitemap Generator – Generate sitemap
- Digg Digg – The Digg button on each post to submit the story to Digg
- Google Analyticator – Plugin used to tie in with Google Analytics, which allows me to see the stats for the site (about 10 visits a day right now)
- Google XML Sitemaps – Create an XML sitemap for submission to the search engines
- Redirection – Mostly for when I mispell something in the URL and then change it. This plugin lets the old URL still work
- Social Bookmarking RELOADED – Makes it easier for readers to submit the stories to social networks and bookmarking sites
- WordPress Database Backup – Allows automated backups of the database to be e-mailed to me every day or week
- WP-SpamFree – Eliminate annoying spam comments
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Adds related stories that are already on the site to the individual stories, and the RSS feed and daily news e-mail
Other Resources
- Feedburner – Used for the e-mail function to send out the stories daily to anyone who subscribes in the top right of the page
- Google Analytics – Package for the web-site to help me see the stats about what’s happening on the site
- Host Gator – My web-site hosting, which is the only thing that I pay for on the site
thats really cool bill. i often wonder, in the midst of some big news story, like the bushfires for example, what is ywam doing in the midst…it has been hard to find that kind of information. i like what you're doing with the website.
Brilliant idea! This sort of thing is desperately needed to keep us together despite our diversity… Maybe you should be putting out requests for virtual staff in light of your recent post.
Blessings
The use of virtual staff is a pretty good idea Jon. Perhaps some of the YWAM Journalism students that are floating around out there would be interested…
The site itself was put together as a proof of concept more than anything else and was built in under an hour, not counting the previous time spent finding the plugins and template. The main thing that I have been using it for so far has been if a story crops up that I am reporting on for the YWAM Podcast that as no corresponding post to link to. I can then write up a story on the news site that gives more detail that I can link to from the Podcast.