Mashing up a church website

Most internet users are familiar with the term "mashup". Commonly used to describe the mixing are technologies to create a web application. There are lots of cool technologies and web applications out there. When I think about building a new church website, as a developer I naturally gravitate towards building it all myself. After all I am an Internet developer, I can do this and best of all I can create. That alone is reason to start. However, it's not always the most efficient way to do things.

In this new age of open source technologies, there are tons of applications out there to build upon, use as examples or even license. So what I really need to be thinking is that I want to build a website mashup up of the pieces I need.

These pieces might be:

• An event registration system
• A photo gallery
• A bulletin board for Prayer Requests
• An online Bible and Bible studies
• An electronic invitation system
• A blog system
• ... many more possibilities ...

The interesting part is searching for them and then how to properly evaluate which one is best for the task. Here my journey begins; which one do I tackle first? How will I get feedback? If you are part of a big church, feedback is easy, but when you have a smaller congregation feedback is light.

Well all my summer conferences and events are coming up, so I think I will start with an event system. I read some stuff on ChurchCrunch about DoAttend and it looks sweet.

Any ideas?