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The Web Empowered Church

Originally published by "dbarker" on 2006-01-24 08:16:00Z

The Web Empowered Church: This is a system to power your church Web site that’s built on Typo3 – the founder of which proclaims his faith directly in the license agreement.

The WEC is a ministry of The Foundation for Evangelism designed to help churches around the world apply Internet technology to enhance evangelism, discipleship, and care.

I’m not a huge fan of Typo3. I thought it was really hard to work with – very confusing. I wish them the best of luck with this project, however.

Comment by "Mark Stephenson" on 2006-01-27 14:25:00Z
My name is Mark Stephenson and I lead the Web-Empowered Church ministry. I have also created multiple websites with TYPO3. TYPO3 is the most powerful open-source CMS I have ever seen. However, with the power comes usability challenges. I can relate to your comment "really hard to work with -- very confusing." In my experience, I have found that TYPO3 is hard to use for the system manager. At the same time, it is very easy to use for those updating the website. In 45 minutes I have trained an administrative person with only basic computer skills to maintain the content on our website. That is important so many people can be contributing to your web ministry and so everything does not need to pass through a technical person on its way to the website. So the challenge is really setting up the website and configuring the MANY options. For this reason, I suggest that only early adopters (people with technical skills who are willing to work harder in order to jump into this exciting technology) use WEC today. However, the good news is that the TYPO3 community is making huge efforts to improve usability. Version 4.5 of TYPO3, due in the first half of next year, should help a lot. Also, WEC is creating extensive training and is developing tools to make TYPO3 easier too. So the future looks very bright and will only get better. WEC is committed for the next several years to empower churches around the world with the most powerful ministry tools anywhere. The powerful tools necessitate a powerful CMS like TYPO3. Our goal is "web-empower" 10,000 churches by the year 2010 but we want to blow past that goal. In order to accomplish this goal, we must ensure TYPO3 and WEC tools are usable by common people in regular churches. And most regular churches are small and not technically savvy. If you'd like to help us in this God dream then please contact me at Mark(at)WebEmpoweredChurch(dot)com. Christians from all around the world are joining in to support this movement of the Holy Spirit to employ Internet technology for the Kingdom. Please see [http://WebEmpoweredChurch.com.](http://WebEmpoweredChurch.com.) -- In Christ, Mark
Comment by "Henry" on 2006-03-11 15:29:00Z
AMEN to that Mark! We need to have tools for the common folk to build websites for Christians to use for reaching people for the Lord. This means that usability has to be paramount. I'm glad there are so many folks working toward this goal! Sincerely, Henry