| Our website is hosted by MediaServe.com - they were orginally known as ChurchQuest.com. You should check out their "About" page (on the side navigation).
One of the primary reason we are still with them is they charge a very decent price, have amazing and fast support, and even though it is not listed as a feature on their website, they do have FFmpeg installed on some of their servers, at no additional charge. We use FFmpeg to convert video formats server-side for videos uploaded by our congregation - basically just like YouTube does behind the scenes.
Our site runs a custom CMS, written in PHP, that I have spent the past few years developing, with church use in mind. Eventually, I hope to release it and allow public use of it. One of the big issues I have with the major CMS (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress) is that they are designed for a specific purpose (Joomla - Hosting Articles, WordPress - blog), and in order to do tasks other then the specific purpose, you have to take different steps/actions then normally, and this can becoming quite confusing for average church secretary/member to handle/customize. Everything can be used in different areas, and I am not hating on Joomla or anything - I use Joomla to run a business website, and it has helped me achieve somethings that I needed to do - every product has its pros and cons, and I just think for a lot of churches most the CMS aren't tailored to church use, and ease of use. So I wanted to develop something that would be simple, and allow ANYONE to update a blog entry, photo gallery, videos, sermons, member directory etc, especially without having to go to an "admin" page to perform the task. My inspiration was actually Facebook - they had all the links to edit, add photos, delete for their photo albums easily accessible on the page you were on. I took that approach for my CMS, and whether you are updating a photo gallery, video, article, all the links are right there on the page (right in your face) for you to add, edit, delete etc... it makes it easy for those people who need to update fast/don't have a lot of experience with CMS. Hahaha well I kinda went on a rant, but I just wanted to share wanted to share what I have seen/experienced. |