Overview
Thanks for your interest in our team. The Digital Faith Community is a web service provided to groups of churches. (Primarily Episcopal Diocese, Methodist Conferences, Presbyterian Churches, etc) These groups are commonly referred to as Diocese. These regional groups of churches share our web based content management system, each church having access to it's own web toolset to help it manage it's activities, people, news and web. We have built the Digital Faith Community using Ruby on Rails, MYSQL, Amazon Web Services. We use Capistrano and our code base is maintained at BeanstalkApp in svn. For each customer deployment, we create a custom web design using ruby and css. Each customer uses our community management system to maintain the content on their website, manage the people that are members of their churches and do other simple tasks like event registration or blogging. How is DFC different than the website hosting? DFC is not website hosting, but rather a Web 2.0 application. With DFC you don't need hosting, its included, as are a number of other features and services. For example, event registration with online payments, publications and posts with blogging, sermon archives, search optimization and much more. DFC is an SaaS system, or Software as a Service. You don't need to worry about hosting, servers, bandwidth requirements, downloaded software or any of the archane details of operting an online community. Just use DFC and we'll worry about the details. How is DFC different than the website we already have? DFC is not just a website, its a community for your entire diocese. Whether you are a diocese, conference, district or other distributed religious non-profit each of your community members can particpate in DFC. It's one thing to visit a pretty website, it's another to be able to interact with your faith community online. Whether its searching for news about a church or sermon, signing up for events or contributing to the discussion through our simple content management system, your members won't just see a pretty website, they'll engage their faith journey online. Will everyone be able to update our website? DFC supports secure user accounts. You'll deterime what permission level contributors have. Whether is contributing to a mission blog or working on a youth group page, each user is assigned a particular permission level and specific content areas that they can contribute to. Won't it be hard for me to support all these users? DFC is more than a robust Web 2.0 application, it's phone, email and online support. Our staff works with each of your community members to help them create their accounts, update their pages and answer questions. We're here to support you too. Over the years our staff has developed the expertise to know what works online, how to deploy your sites and how to help your members.