I like to recommend WordPress because the library of WordPress plugins is massive.

I’d like to call attention to some that I used for my meeting’s site:

  •  WP Church Center adds a central hub for people to learn about and take whatever their next step in involvement, whether that’s “sign up for Intro to Quakers,” “join a small group,” or “get involved in committee service.” This is a free alternative to Nucleus, which costs about $90/mo. Combined with a custom app icons plugin, you can save this central hub to your phone.
    screenshot on phone of adelphifriends.org/hub

    WP Church Center is built to be mobile friendly

  • WPML – for bilingual meetings this adds a language picker and space for you to type in translations of any text on your website. This one costs money.
  • Yoast analyzes the search engine optimization of each page so you can make sure your website ranks well in Google results. It also rates how easy your text is to read, so you can write for all readers.
  • All-in-One Event Calendar can display the entire calendar, a calendar with committee meetings filtered out, or whatever else you need. It has an “upcoming events” view you can include elsewhere on the site too.
    screenshot of October 2017 calendar

    All-in-One Calendar lets you create filtered calendar views, so you can display only public events while keeping space rentals out of regular visitors’ sight. Events are color-coded too.

  • Contact Form 7 creates contact forms for emailing your clerk, pastor, or committees
  • Adminimize & User Role Editor allow you to choose who can do and see what in the WordPress admin. With these two, I’ve presented a very minimal view for committee members. They can update their own pages, but they can’t touch anything else in the administrator dashboard.

No matter how big or small your meeting is, I suggest Yoast and WP Church Center.

Other WordPress plugins

Other potentially-useful plugins include Prayer Engine (for submitting and viewing prayer requests) and Groups Engine (for organizing and mapping small groups). If you’re programmed, you might complete the trifecta with Series Engine to post recordings of your prepared messages. These are also for-pay plugins.

iThemes Security is another one to look into. The primary thing is that it lets you change the address of the WordPress administrative dashboard. Since more than a quarter of websites run WordPress, some people try to attack those sites (why would they go after a Quaker meeting? for ransom), and this will foil any automated attempts.

Series