When we originally designed the Church Plant Media Content Management System, our goal was to create an easy-to-use system that would serve church plants, existing churches, and church planting organizations. Since our core focus is to serve gospel-centered churches, we chose to develop specific modules that every church needs. Now that hundreds of churches are using our system, we felt it was time for a system refresh. The best part? It is available to all churches on the new Church Plant Media CMS at no additional charge.

Right from the beginning, our objective was to make managing content not only easy, but enjoyable. In order to take things to a new level, we are rethinking and retooling hundreds of details related to system functionality, usability, and design. We have been refreshing colors, enhancing subtle textures, rounding off corners, adding new buttons, and improving system actions. We are even building some new tools that we know will come in handy as you edit your content.

With a target release set for mid-2011, we wanted you to know that we are hard at work refreshing the CMS by improving the overall usability of our system and making it even more pleasing to the eye. We can't wait to release it and we think you are going to love it!

Just to give you a little taste, here is what we have been up to and what we have planned...

Behold, our new Dashboard!


Refresh-Dashboard

Dashboard-Specific Features

  • Create New - Need to set up a new page, event, sermon, blog post or media file? Look no further than the Create New button. We are also adding this button into the control strip at the bottom of the CMS, in order to make it available at all times, no matter where you are in the system.
  • Daily Site Visits - We have always offered the ability to integrate with Google Analytics for your website statistics. To give your website visits some quick visibility within the system, we are adding a stats chart right into the Dashboard.
  • Recent Activity - Ever wonder what other website administrators are doing in the system? Well, wonder no more. You will be able to easily see what your fellow admins are creating or editing by checking out the sidebar in the Dashboard.
  • Latest Comments - Since blogging and interacting with comments on your blog(s) is such a big deal, we wanted to bring the latest comments into view, to allow for quick and easy comment moderation.
  • Featured Help Tools - We will be featuring some of our most commonly used help tools from our new Help Center, right on the Dashboard. Then, when you click the Help Center tab at the top, you will have access to even more help videos and articles that will coach you through each module.
  • Feature Roadmap - We know you are interested in what we have on deck for 2011, so we decided to add a few of these items right on the Dashboard for you to track with a % status of completion.

Five Additional Updates in the Works

  • Publish quickview - We are adding a new “gear” icon to the list view that will come in handy when you need to make a quick change. You will be able to publish, save as a draft, feature or rename your content right on the fly.
  • Sidebar redesign - When you edit a page, sermon, event, or post, you’ll notice a nifty new sidebar. We are also moving the publish and draft buttons into the sidebar to reduce scrolling.
  • Enhanced WYSIWYG editor - In order to keep it simple, we only add new functionality when absolutely necessary. We are adding new tools into the content editor, yet we have reduced the space that the editing tools take up.
  • Navigation module reloaded - We are completely revamping the drag-n-drop interface of our navigation module. We think these changes will make this module much more intuitive.
  • New file features - We will be displaying a realtime % of file space used. We are also adding the option to link with an external image file or an embedded video, which means you can easily integrate your Vimeo and YouTube videos.

Here are a few things that are on deck for 2011...

  • Apps - You will be able to display your media, events, and other content in an app.
    (This will be available for an extra charge.)
  • Partner support portal - You’ll always be able to call our toll-free number for help, but if you prefer to post a ticket, soon you’ll be able to do that right inside the CMS instead of in Basecamp.
    (This will be a free release to all.)
  • Galleries - Easily add or update your quicklinks and image rotators with our new galleries module.
    (This will be a free release to those that use quicklinks or the optional image rotator module).
  • Image editing - Don’t have PhotoShop? No worries... crop, rotate, and resize images in the CMS.
    (This will be a free release to all.)
  • Custom feeds - Tailor your RSS feeds based on different criteria (series, speaker, topic, etc).
    (This will be a free release to all.)

We hope these improvements will serve you as you serve your church, building your website and advancing the gospel. This free system refresh is only just the beginning of what we have planned for our system in 2011. The future of Church Plant Media is very bright indeed.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Want to talk turkey about a new website? Shoot us a note or give us a shout at (800) 409-6631 × 1.

Updated March 24, 2011