St Mark’s Kennington church website – 2013

The brief for this church website was to make it easy to keep up to date – so key to this was adding functionality that would always display the most up to date information on the front page – what was happening this week, what the events were that were coming up and what the latest news was. The easiest way to tackle the first without writing a whole calendar framework was writing an integration with Google calendar, so those in the church office could just keep the Google calendar up to date rather than having to update the website directly – the latest iteration of this code is on GitHub

From there, it was clear that it would be useful for the weekly news sheet to be made available on the website. By this time, I’d transitioned the site across to use WordPress, so I created a custom post type of “News Item” to allow our church administrator to add and remove news items easily, along with expiry dates so that old news items wouldn’t persist. This was followed shortly by a custom post type of “Sermon” so that both text and audio of sermons could be easily uploaded to the site, as well as a final custom post type of “Highlight” for a front page carousel, again with expiry dates.