Co-Mission: The Church Community
Co-Mission is an organisation that represents a collection of churches across the Greater London area. They identified a need for an online community. The purpose; support the people in charge of the various congregations, their staff and others who devote their time to the respective churches. Here’s how we helped…
Key deliverables for Co-Mission included:
- The Community – Creation of an invite-only community. The community supports the Co-Mission’s churches. Individuals who make up these churches can connect with other members.
- Profiling & Grouping – Links individual members to the church they are affiliated to and allows them to build a profile detailing their role plus other relevant information.
- Blog Posting – Members can post articles without the needing to use a content management system.
- File Sharing – A facility for blog posts to support the upload of files (pdf, word, etc.) and to present these files for download.
- Private Posting – Provides key member groups within the community the ability to post blogs that can only be seen by other members in the group.
- Curated Content – Enables admins to curate posts, and add them to ‘collection’. A dedicated section of the community displays these collections.
- Address Book – Allows members of the community to find other members based on a range of search and filter criteria.
- Events Calendar – Allows members to stay up to date with key events within the church collective.
FOCUS: Events Calendar
The client’s requirements for the events calendar feature were very specific. They included:
- Event creation interface allowing for the addition of multiple sets of data including details, start and end time/date, location, organiser, URL, etc
- Display a map of the event location to community members
- RSVP mechanism, allowing members to state if they are attending/not attending. Members and admins can view the resulting information.
- Option to include attachments for download by members
- Ability for members to add events to their calendars via ical and google calendar
There are many excellent calendar plugins. However, none fitted the exact specifications the client was looking for. In order to meet our client’s exacting requirements, a Zipline Exclusive Plugin was developed.
FOCUS: Private Posting
The Co-mission community required a private posting feature. There was a realisation that private posting could lead to ‘community in community’ functionality. This is the idea that you can have multiple groups of people, within the same community domain, who do not necessarily see content produced by each other. BuddyPress, a WordPress plugin we use, offers group functionality, which goes someway to fulfilling this. But we wanted more control! The result; A Zipline Exclusive Plugin, an exciting development that has functionality and application beyond the core deliverable.