Interview with Rev. Rishi Saravanan

Interview with Composr community member, Rev. Rishi Saravanan of Saiva Siddhanta Church.

1) Tell us about your website: what is it called, what's the URL, and what is the mission behind it?

Our website is called Saiva Siddhanta Church– A Global Spiritual Fellowship. URL is saivasiddhanta.org. It is a private social website to better connect members and students of our tiny Saivite Hindu church (only about 350 formal members), since they are spread across the world. Our physical headquarters is in Hawaii, but nearly all of our members live outside Hawaii.


2) Tell us about yourself: what led you to the point of building a website?

The core of our church is a group of 19 monastics at our monastery headquarters on Kauai. From Kauai we minister to a group of family devotees. For years we relied on physical visits, postal mail, phone calls, emails and a simple email newsletter to connect with our members. The main thing lacking here was that our members geographically distant couldn't connect with each other. So, six years ago we finally decided to create a social website.


3) How did you come to know about Composr, and what made you choose Composr for your website?

We were looking around for free CMS software, initially played a bit with Drupal, then ran across Composr (ocPortal back then) website and appreciated seeing a large set of features combined with the ability within the same sphere to hire support for building the website. I wanted our members to be able to interact and coordinate with one another through news posts, blogs, image and video galleries, forum discussions, chat, wiki, and document storage, and Composr had all these features already built in rather than having to install them from third party vendors.


4) How has Composr helped you?

What has helped the most, is being able to hire the Composr engineers to custom build and tweak certain portions of the website for us, and some of those enhancements also being folded into new public versions of the CMS. Also the stability of it has been wonderful; very few maintenance issues once we ironed out all the custom coding.


5) Where do you want to see Composr go in the future?

I support Chris's recent writeup about opening up Composr to a bigger community of contributing coders, which gives me a more secure sense that Composr will stick around for the long haul. I used to wonder sometimes if it would, and how it would be a shame to be stuck with porting our website into a different CMS.

6) What do you consider as your most significant achievements on your website so far?

a) The 'yearbook' visual layout of member listings, plus the ability to filter groups of members. This has been a powerful tool for us.
b) Creating some syncing between the website member profile fields and our internal monastery contact database (which uses 4D software)
 

7) Do you consider yourself more artist, techie, or writer? Or perhaps something else?

A bit of all, master of none


8) Are most of your hits from mobile users, tablet users, or desktop users?

Haven't researched this


9) What countries do your visitors come from primarily?

Malaysia, Mauritius, USA


10) Besides your website, what else do you do in your free time? What are your passions?

All my time is lived as a monk. It's a combination of worship, meditation and other spiritual disciplines, along with being of service to our church members and students, and a wider community of seekers.

Edited the post to add the homepage screenshot of saivasiddhanta.org