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The redesigned fmcusa.org.
When we set out to redesign and relaunch the old freemethodistchurch.org, we weren’t just looking to change one site. We wanted to unify and solidify the Web presence of the denomination’s many departments and ministries.
WordPress is our tool of choice, for a few reasons:
- It’s open source.
- There is a huge community of developers doing cool things with it.
- Updating content is easy for people with limited tech background.
- The ability to create multi-site networks is built-in.
The end result is fmcusa.org and its family of subsites such as Human Resources, the Marston Memorial Historical Center and Light & Life Communications.
Woo
The site uses a theme created by WooThemes, a WordPress theme development firm based in South Africa. The theme is called Canvas, so named because it is meant to be a flexible base. If you take a look at the demo, you’ll see our end result is very different.
When your themes are having children
Since we want every subsite to reflect the look and feel of fmcusa.org, we created a child theme all the subsites could use. However, because some sites have custom functionality, we ended up creating separate child themes for each site, and writing those functions in on an individual basis. We implemented this system when we launched the site at general conference this summer.
In practice, that didn’t work out as well as we hoped. When we wanted to make changes to the family of sites, we would often have to change each stylesheet independently. There had to be a better way.
Plugging in functionality
The "Stories" custom post type, which is used to collect user-generated content, is a plugin.
The biggest problem we had to overcome is individual site functionality. The HR staff doesn’t need to have our custom post type for Missionaries cluttering their site. Likewise, the Leadership Development staff doesn’t need to worry about the Your Story custom post type when they’re editing their content.
The answer is functionality plugins. By creating plugins for custom functions, we are able to keep our master child theme slim and trim. Now, every subsite uses the same child theme, meaning changes to structure and styling are as simple as editing one stylesheet.
The stylesheet for fmcusa.org has been completely rewritten to be a sleek child theme of Canvas. Every subsite has its color scheme applied through a snippet of custom CSS.
Shrink the change
In the future, we plan on offering websites to conferences and other Free Methodist ministries. As the network gets larger, changes like this are an important part of serving departments, ministries and conferences effectively. Our team is small. The more efficient we can be, the better.
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