Question

Photo of Tom Stuart

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Rock Rms vs Wordpress - Benefits & Limitations

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Hello, our church is considering to use Rock Rms as website platform/cms. I have some questions:

- Do you have list of "public websites" that are created with Rock Rms?

- What are the benefits (and also limitations) of using Rock Rms compared to other website platforms such as Wordpress & Webflow?

- Are there any marketplace that we can buy professional themes, plugins etc for public website? (Like Wordpress)

- Our church is using Rock Rms as "church membership management system", if we have a Wordpress website or php based site, do Rock Rms has API / webhook so we can authenticate user from external? If we need to access user profile from external, do Rock Rms has an API?

Thank you for your assistance

Tom

  • Photo of Daniel Hazelbaker

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    I only have partial answers for you Tom, but I'll offer my thoughts:

    1. There is a list of public websites built from Rock, but I'm honestly not sure if that is posted anywhere just because it can change so fast.

    2. One benefit of using Rock as your CMS is that you can tightly integrate things like event registration, online giving, etc. You also get benefits of being able to use Lava, Content Channels and other things to be able customize the content to the logged in person as well as a single point of "data entry". Meaning, for example with Content Channels, your staff can create content channel items one time and you can use that same content in various places (both internally in Rock and externally on the public website) by just formatting the data differently. Having said that, there is a Wordpress plugin (I think called Rockpress) that helps you integrate Rock data into your Wordpress website.

    2b. Some of the limitations of Rock (not really a limitation per-se), is that the marketplace ecosystem is not as evolved. Wordpress has been around since 2003. Rock has been around since about 2014 - obviously Wordpress will have a much richer ecosystem just from how long its been around. As far as the CMS itself, I would say there really aren't any "limitations". It just comes down to how much effort you want to put in. If you are already familiar with Wordpress, then moving your website to Rock is going to be more difficult because you are already familiar with the existing product. If your current Wordpress site consists of a generic theme you downloaded (and never customized) with one person who sorta-knows Wordpress adding content, then switching to Rock would probably not be a big hurdle.

    3. There is a marketplace for plugins for Rock, but it currently only has a single theme. There are many plugins, but most of the themes churches build are very customized to their own needs so are not (easily) sharable. Wordpress themes tend to be more generalized - which means there are many websites I go to and say "hey, I recognize that theme!". Whatever CMS system you use, if you want it to look custom to you, it means you are dropping into some HTML (or PHP or whatever) to change the way things look.

    4. There is a pretty rich API, though it's admittedly not _extremely_ well documented as most people don't actually use it (because we run our websites on Rock so we just use Lava (Liquid) to access that data rather than the API).