Omaha Bible Church (OBC) is a thriving Christ centered church located in Omaha, Nebraska. OBC uses its website as one of many ways to proclaim the glory of Christ to the local community and the world. The website provides information about the church, its many ministries, and written and audio materials to help individuals know and grow in Christ. As an indication of the reach of OBC’s website the church has an average attendance of approximately 450 individuals while the website has seen up to 3500 unique visitors a month from all over the world.

"By customizing the templates you have the ability to build a site that looks and behaves the way you want it to. The wide range of highly configurable content containers is also a big plus."

Omaha Bible Church had a significant and recognized presence on the web long before many other churches were on-line thanks to the work of one of its members, Karen Bauer. Before using WebGUI, OBC relied on a more traditional web development model based on centralized content management where Karen maintained nearly all of the content. In 2004, Eric Kennedy began talking with Karen about using a web-based Content Management System (CMS) in order to provide a distributed content management model. Karen was very interested and Eric began researching open source CMSs on the Internet, using informational sites such as cmsmatrix.org. Eric knew that the church’s new content management system would have to be flexible and provide a range of applications. After testing
several of the leading CMSs available at the time Eric recommended that the church use WebGUI. While WebGUI met their needs at the time they were particularly excited about, and anticipated, the enhancements that came out in version 7.

"The overall infrastructure provided by WebGUI and the WRE allow you to easily manage the system and extend it to meet specialized requirements."

The ease of use of version 7 is having a significant impact on OBC’s ability to distribute content management responsibilities to a variety of people in the church. With minimal training, at times only over the phone, non-technical users have been able to develop content including on-line forms used for conference registration. WebGUI’s new versioning system has also been an asset in facilitating training and content approval prior to publishing. The template system allows OBC to distribute content
management while enforcing overall site design constraints. Eric Kennedy states, “By customizing the templates you have the ability to build a site that looks and behaves the way you want it to. The wide range of highly configurable content containers (i.e., assets) is also a big plus.”

OBC uses the WebGUI Runtime Environment (WRE) in its implementation. Eric says, “the overall infrastructure provided by WebGUI and the WRE allow you to easily manage the system and extend it to meet specialized requirements." The church’s site contains sermon, class, and conference audio along with interviews with a number of significant figures from the Christian community. Through the use of a customized content container, OBC has automated the uploading, indexing, and distribution of audio files to its users. As another indication of the scalability of WebGUI based sites, OBC currently hosts almost 3.5 GB of audio files and serves up to 100GB of content per month.

OBC’s website is a fine example of how extensible and user friendly a WebGUI based site can be. The church’s website serves a wide community, and WebGUI allows the church to customize its content to best serve the needs of that community. Eric stated that, “many times when you ask someone how they found out about the church they say they learned about it through the website.” OBC is thankful to have a tool like WebGUI to help it proclaim Christ to the world around it.

"Many times when you ask someone how they found out about the church they say they learned about it through the website."