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

• WordPress

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