New Websites
New DC2 websites launched in January 2022:
Updates
These are the latest updates that have been released to Church Edit. These updates will be available to Dioceses once they are on the new Design Builder release - we will be working with Dioceses to migrate them over the coming months. This is different from the usual releases when we would normally release an update to everyone - the Design Builder is such a major release that requires us to work with each Diocese individually to update their site/design.
Once we have completed the DC2 Design Builder templates we will apply these to the Diocese Sandbox sites so that a Diocese can explore the Design Builder on their Sandbox site. This is planned to be available end of February.
Design Builder
As you will no doubt be aware, we have been working on this update for a long time. Our planning started in May 2020 and as we started to come up with the User Experience and User Interface it became clear that we could build a completely new way of customising the website compared to the original proposal we presented to DC2 in 2019.
We started the development in January 2021 and it has been the main Church Edit development throughout the last year so we are really pleased to release version 1 of the Design Builder to DC2. This has been the biggest update we have ever released for Church Edit and the whole of the main website (non Global Office) had to be re-written for this as as well as part of Global office.
Some of the features:
Fully responsive
Create your website and it will automatically be responsive for the different screen sizes (no need for separate content for mobile/ desktop homepages).
Use Widgets on any page
Widgets can now be added to any of your pages so you could have latest news articles, or upcoming events shown on any of the pages.
Lots of Widgets to choose from
These are the widgets we currently have (with more to come soon):
calendar - show upcoming events
rotator - add rotating graphics, set publish and expiry dates for each image
latest articles - show a listing of the latest articles
poll - create a question and up to 4 answers and let people vote
daily message - create a message for each day and Church Edit will show the relevant one for each day
social media links - add links to your social media pages
Facebook - embed your church facebook page
Twitter - embed your church twitter page
Instagram - embed an instagram post
video - embed YouTube and Vimeo videos to your site (no HTML needed)
podcasts - your latest sermons added to any page
search - add a search widget to any page
text/ images - add text and images anywhere within your design.
Headers/ Footer
As you create different layouts for your pages, we know that often the top or bottom part of your pages tend to stay the same, so we have made it easy to share a header or footer across multiple pages.
Background Images or Videos
Easily add a video or image to appear behind the main content of the page.
A Diocese will be able to use the Design Builder to fully customise their site once we have migrated their site across. It will be easy for a Diocese to add further widgets to the different pages. The Church Edit support team are here to offer help as always.
Extensible Database (XDB) Updates
Importing of XDB Records - this was a Phase 2 request as a result of Dioceses wanting to add their parish statistics to the website. The import allows for the spreadsheet of data to be imported and an XDB record/page created for each of the parishes.
The benefit of the XDB means that it could be used for any where where the similar style of records is required. Up to 10 different XDB's can be added to each Diocese site.
Allowing External Records - whilst each XDB record can have its own page on your site, sometimes it might be that you require the XDB entry to go to an external website. It is now possible to customise the XDB so that external records are added. The record will show within the XDB listing but when clicked on will go to the external website.
Tags on the XDB Pages - Tags can now be shown on the website and used to filter out the results. This is a live update so that the matching records update as soon as a tag is selected/unselected. Multiple tags can be selected to filter out these results. Tags can also be shown for each of the records listed. These options can be turned on per XDB.
The tags will also show on the individual XDB record. The Diocese of Oxford funded part of the developments of the XDB Tags/ external link and filtering.