Webskein
Webskein was conceived in the mid-2000s as a practical and labour-saving website system for smaller churches and Christian groups, with the aims of (i) maximising the value of a church website; (ii) minimising the effort taken to run it.
Thus it has, amongst other things...
- a calendar and events system which can also generate a printable PDF weeekly newsletter / pew sheet;
- tools to help churches put their sites at the heart of their community, by including local useful links, RSS feeds (though the hostility of big commerce to a useful tool that couldn't be monetised has taken its toll) and weather reports;
- a simple template system which makes it easy to produce good, presentable content (and quite difficult to make badly-presented content);
- a sophisticated user management and approvals system which can grant users different access rights (read-only, author, publisher - or none) to different parts of the site.
Importantly - and the clue is in the name - the original vision for Webskein was that it would work productively for groups of sites across districts/regions/nationally. 'The whole becomes so much more than the sum of its parts.' Clusters can be created, with a cluster manager, allowing content (Diocesan Prayer Diary daily entries, Safeguarding policies, sets of links to national resources, etc.) to be added centrally and become available on all sites in the cluster, at the discretion of each local site owner.
Webskein has since found use as a general tool for creating small websites of all kinds... such as this one. It has also been used as the basis for other projects, with additional custom modules and templates.
One Goose is a Webskein spin-off, a simplified version optimised for making one page, one-off websites.