A parish website stuck on Joomla 3, moved before the third defacement
A church site built in 2015 had been defaced twice and needed one particular volunteer to post the bulletin. It's on Payload CMS now, and the office posts it in five minutes.
This shows the kind of work we do. It is not a client engagement, and the business in it is invented.
- 4named admin accounts, replacing nine shared ones
- 10 yrsof bulletins searchable on the new site
- 5 minto post the weekly bulletin, on any day of the week
Where it started
The problem
Nobody had upgraded the site since it went up. Joomla 3 stopped getting security fixes in 2023, and the site had been defaced twice, once with pharmacy spam and once with a page in a language nobody in the congregation spoke.
Mostly the parish office wanted to post the weekly bulletin. That took the one volunteer who knew the admin panel, and she was only around on Thursdays.
What changed
What we did
Everything moved to Payload CMS with a plain Astro front end: sermons, events, the bulletin archive back to 2016, and about three hundred photos from parish events, every old URL redirected.
Posting the bulletin is now a single upload. The office drops in the PDF and the site makes a searchable page from it, so someone hunting for last Easter's service times can actually find them.
Admin access went from nine shared logins, most belonging to people who'd moved away, to four named accounts with two-factor sign-in.
We host and patch it for the parish on a small monthly arrangement. It's been quiet.
Built with
- Payload CMS
- Astro
- MongoDB
- Cloudflare
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