Results tagged “new-hope”

The last update I had for the church web site
was in August
. I'm now proud to announce that the new design that Jay Risner put together for us is now online. I want to use this blog to briefly talk about the design, but mostly to map out where I hope to take the site next.

Design and Administration

The design mostly speaks for itself, though there's one hidden piece which is kind of handy. One of the difficult things about Drupal from a design standpoint is the fact that the CMS backend isn't in a backend. That is, with many other CMSes out there, such as WordPress, Joomla, and Magnolia you work in a separate interface to do the work of creating new stories and articles. The web designer doesn't have to cope with these at all because no casual visitor will ever see them. With Drupal, however, the admin interface is integrated with the front-end of the web site. Drupal merely adds another set of administrative menus and screens into the front-end. Thus, you have a long set of menus that your design has to cope with.

In the case of the new New Hope Church design, you can't just let this menu go into the sidebar because the sidebar was designed to be simple. The solute we came up with was to create an extra sidebar that sits in the brown background to the left side. I got the idea for this from the Trac
web site which places a menu on the left side of the main column and ads on the right. Since Jay's original design was so well-structured, it was really just a matter of creating an extra float to sit off to the left to work it in.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead to what I would like to do with the site next I see a number of different sub-projects that need to be handled. The most obvious is a few incremental improvements to the new design. I cobbled together the current front-page and I don't really care for it. I need to get all the pieces of the front-page looking and fitting together better. I would like to move the login to a bar just under the banner. I would like to get all the columns laid out and pretty. I would like the directions to include a map. I would like the Flash banner to look better when Flash isn't available. Etc.

Speaking of maps, I would like to incorporate more maps into the site. There are a number of nifty things we can do with maps if we just take the time to implement them. For example, our church considers the central gathering to be only a small part of what we do. We could make that much more obvious if we added a map of the LIFE groups and other smaller meetings that take place throughout the week. Being in a college town, we send out quite a few members and it would be nifty to see a map of where our "alumni" have gone.

I would like to make it a community organization tool. I would like to see members come to the web site to find out when and where things are happening. It would be nifty if there was a way for groups to record recent happenings for their members to read about. It could even include things like a current list of prayer requests and other information. This would allow alumni and those who missed something to keep up with their groups similar to the way I keep up with friends I don't hear from often via Facebook
. It could help facilitate discussions such as helping to arrange who's going to bring meals to a family or who's bringing which dish to a supper meeting. This could help avoid the mess of email lists each group maintains themselves.

A frequent request is for a member directory to be placed online. This could be done if access to the directory was regulated appropriately. It would be great to be able to have this information online for people to change as soon as the move or to let former members keep their information available for anyone who wishes to stay in touch.

And finally, back to the mundane, the site is really disorganized right now. I need to establish some order for the site if any of this is to work in a way that will be useful. Since I'm hoping to allow the structure to be somewhat organic, the structure must be somewhat fluid so that it can grow and flex to fit differing needs. On the other hand, certain pieces of information need to be highly structured (such as information about leadership, beliefs, and other fact sheets) and I need to provide for this as well.

Anyway, there's a lot to do on the site. I just hope that I have time (or help!) to get it done with a baby due any day now.

Cheers.

One of the features I'm looking into the improved New Hope Church web site is Organic Groups. Organic Groups is a module for Drupal that allows for the creation of sub-communities in a social networking site. Every social network is made up of a larger collection of individuals that all have a collective goal or interest they are pursuing. However, each individual has their own unique abilities (er, maybe that should be Unique Ability¿, oh wait, this is my blog, not work ;), interests, and agenda. Generally, the individuals will sort themselves into a clique within the larger community that allows them to serve and be served in a way that fits. Organic Groups is the Drupal-way of facilitating this.

How would this be useful to New Hope Church? After installing the module, I would grant each person with the Ministry Leader or Staff Member role the ability to create groups. This includes everyone who runs a LIFE group in our church. Each leader could then create a group for the group or groups they lead. Then, each member of that group can subscribe to the group and gain access to the group discussion. Each group could have a forum for discussions, a calendar of events, documents such as current lesson notes, blogs, prayer requests, audio messages, image galleries, mailing lists, etc. Anything the main site can have, we can allow each group to have within itself. Group data could be made public for anyone to read or private just for subscribed group members and subscription can require approval by the group leader. That's a lot of flexibility.

Okay, sounds great. However, there are a few caveats. This will require work to setup and probably some amount of maintenance. Currently, I'm only one guy with some help from a couple others. However, if this became popular, I'm betting I will have at least one or two other folks interested in helping out. Another caveat is that not everyone will want to participate in the online part of the site. Some may not want to visit the site and some groups, accountability groups, for example, might need a level of privacy that prevents this from being useful to them. That's fine. They don't have to use it if they don't want to, but that doesn't need to limit the others.

The last issue is that I'm basing all of this on my reading of the Organic Group documentation. I've found that implementation, invariably, differs from documentation. Therefore, I suggest that it may not be quite as flexible or cool as I've described, but the general idea is definitely in place and the majority of it does work as I expect (I have demoed parts of the functionality).

Anyway, that's my vision for how to increase LIFE group communications online. This idea was never as fully formed as this, but it has been the general vision from the beginning to facilitate communication and community through the web site from the beginning of this project in 2003. I think we're very close to making this a reality now. I'm excited.

Cheers.

Okay, so I've been doing quite a bit of development on this site and my church web site at home. When in Linux, I always use Firefox. It's convenient and has all the tools I need for web development, which is nearly all I do at work. On Linux, it's also pretty solid---not rock solid, but I use a heavy load of plugins.

However, at home, I do a combination of blogging, reading email, sorting photos, Bible study, etc. in addition to the home development projects I work on. When I'm browsing the web for anything other than development, even research for development, I nearly always run Safari. However, when working on web development, I nearly always use Firefox (except to test how things look in Safari. Why?

On Linux, Firefox is pretty solid. On Mac OS X Tiger, it's rock solid, but it bogs down and eats up the memory of my poor little Mac Mini if I do much with it. When I'm doing development, I usually try to close out everything I don't need and cope with the shortness of memory (which is really the problem since my Mini isn't fully upgraded in that arena). Safari, on the other hand, is rock solid and lightning fast all the time. It doesn't bog down, but it doesn't have all the tools I use in Firefox that make web development go so well. Anyway, I use both very heavily and flip between them pretty regularly.

The moral? I don't really have one, I'm just saying that's how I work and since I'm in blogaholic mode, I felt like a writeup on the topic. However, while I'm at it, I will recount my absolute favorite Firefox extensions, which are the reason why I use it for development. If you read any of the following be sure to read the first and last bullets!

• Web Developer. This is a must have for any web developer. It places a toolbar menu in Firefox which allows for quickly testing forms, discovering form details, live editting of CSS, turning on/off plugins, clearing authentication data, and learning other information about a page.
• Colorzilla. This is a prerequisite for web design. It gives you an eyedropper you can use on a page to figure out what any color is. I've had a few problems with it over the last few months claiming that my browser wasn't supported (when it worked before, bah), but that seems to have been fixed now.
• Aardvark. Ever want to know which parts of the page are in which boxes and what tag that is or what the class is? Once started, it visually highlights and names which box your mouse is hovering over. I use this in situations when I just want to check real quick because there are a couple other options available for digging deeper.
• Google Toolbar. This isn't explicitly for development, but it does make getting to my favorite search engine a lot faster.
• Venkman. This tool is overkill for most the problems I face. This is a full debugger for JavaScript in which you can set breakpoints and really get into the guts of the JavaScript engine. I suspect this would be very useful for anyone building Firefox extensions, but it really is too much for debugging nearly any web page issue I've faced. I still have it installed, just in case.
• Google Browser Sync. Since I use many of the same resources at home and at work, this tool is very useful. It synchronizes my bookmarks and other data between computers and even allows me to resume a previous session if my browser crashes or if I just want to pick up where I left off when I move from the kitchen computer to downstairs.
• Firebug. This is the coolest plugin ever! It provides a nifty debug console that you can use with JavaScript by just inserting console.log() statements to your scripts. It shows a status bar widget that shows how many JavaScript or CSS errors have occurred on the current page since it was loaded. It contains a basic debugger that is much simpler and has just the right level of functionality for trying to work out the harder script errors. Finally, it has a very detailed inspector that has an Aardvark-like inspection feature which outlines boxes in the top pane while showing the tags in the parsed source in the bottom pane. This shows the DOM tree as it exists after your JavaScript has modified it as well, which is super helpful. You can drill down pretty far.

Okay, so I'm announcing here the first mini-launch of the New Hope Church web site. The site is now running on a later version of Drupal and should have most of the old features intact, with a very few additions. I need to get the login information to Eric so he can start on the theming now so we can have the full launch.

I'm most excited right now about the new features that are coming rather than the few I've added. I'm going to talk about both and the features we already had as a reminder.

Existing Features

The New Hope Church web site has featured these capabilities to date:

Blogging

Any staff member or ministry leader in the system has had the ability to create a blog within the site. However, a very limited set of members have been given the appropriate permissions and of those, they generally have blogs elsewhere or not at all.

Comments

Any authenticated visitor to the site may add comments to most of the stories, audio messages, and events on the site. Again, however, this has never been used. It has never been advertised and I don't know if anyone has noticed the comment links since the current site design works to hide them.

Contact Forms

Each staff member has a contact form on the site. This was the only available way of contacting staff members during the previous iteration because I never implemented a better way. The main problem is that the contact forms require registration to work.

Events

This was one of the most heavily used features. The only serious issue with this was that recurring events weren't possible, so we couldn't add events like the Fusion youth meetings or Sunday gatherings unless we wanted to add each and every occurrence. I don't think anyone on staff has that much time to spare.

Messages

This is the single most used feature of the site. We upload audio to the site and then visitors can read notes about the sermon, download the audio, and listen to Podcasts.

Map

There is a map on the site showing the location of the old church office, Flint Hills Christian School where we meet for on Sunday, and the location of our land. Unforunately, an IE bug I documented a while back keeps that from working properly for anyone using IE.

Notifications

Staff, ministry leaders, and administrators (i.e., me) can setup email notifications when the site changes. I originally use this to watch for when Tony uploads the audio and to check back to make sure things were working. However, I confess that I've been simply deleting the notifications lately.

Pages

Various informational pages have been placed on the site. So far, this isn't much used, but I think that we'll see the amount of information on the site increase over time.

Biographies

Each staff member has a bio on the site associated with their user page. Any member of the site may also have a biography. More information could be added to the member profiles in the future, but I have no direction on what kind of information folks would like to see.

Search

The Drupal search abilities were a little pathetic in 4.5 and 4.6, but it looks like things are quite a bit better now in 4.7.

Announcements

In addition to events, some announcements don't have a specific date associated with them. These are heavily used in the current system and this should continue.

Categorization

Currently, categorization is only used to differentiate between which announcements and events belong to which ministries. With this update I've replaced the original categorization system with a different system that I think will serve us better.

Throttling

The site does have some throttling capabilities. That is, when it starts to see heavy loads, the site will start disabling some features of the site to keep it from being too overloaded. I've not configured this very well yet, so it probably needs to be looked at some more.

TinyMCE

No one visiting the site needs to know HTML. All pages can be editted using an editor with a Word-like interface.

Upload

Staff and ministry leaders can upload files to the site to associate them with stories, pages, events, etc. Unfortunately, our hosting service limits uploads to under 10MB, so this doesn't always serve us very well.

URL Filter

All documents on the site will automatically convert unlinked URLs and email addresses into links. This is also meant to simplify how the site is used for the non-tech-savvy.

Okay, that's what we already had. Now, on to what has been added.

New Features

Here's the list of new features that I've added with this update of the software running the web site.

Categories

I've switched the system from the "taxonomy" plugin to the "categories" plugin. One of the main reasons Drupal is popular is it's "taxonomy" system which provides a very rich language for describing metadata. Metadata, in this case, is basically just extra keywords associated with any particular page on the site.

For example, an announcement might have a taxonomy term associated with it named "Announcement" in the "Section" vocabulary. It might also have a term of "LIFE Groups" associated with it in the "Ministry" vocabulary. Each term is a particular keyword and each vocabulary is just a set of related keywords. The taxonomy system is very nice, but it has a shortcoming in that you can't describe the terms themselves very well. For example, what are "LIFE Groups"? What is a "Ministry"? These might be legitimate questions we'd like to answer and the taxonomy provides only a very rudimentary solution to this problem. I used some weak solutions in the previous version of Drupal to address this problem, but they didn't really work very well.

With the latest version of Drupal there's a new module called, "Categories" that promotes each vocabulary to a first-class citizen called a container and each term to a first-class citizen called a category. Each of these have the same full power as a regular web page and can contain a full description of what they are. This is a cool enough feature, that I will probably start using it on this web site soon. Kudos to Greenash for pioneering this.

Repeating Events

This resolves the old problem of not being able to have recurring events on the calendar. We can now create an event for Sunday morning worship and then make it a recurring event that repeats to a certain date. Handy.

Feedback

In addition to the Contact forms already in place. I've now added three new feedback forms that do not require creating an account to use. This will surely mean a little more spam for those of us on the receiving end, but that's not easy to avoid. There's now a form that is kind of an online "white card" like we pass out in church, a form for prayer requests, and a form for site problems.

Google Analytics

The chuch site has started collecting more statistics about visitors to help us improve the content of the site. I used Google Analytics because it's free, though, we've had some worries about it's accuracy at work. I'm hoping it will be better than nothing.

Just in case, I have also added a couple other stats modules to Drupal as well, to use Drupal's built-in statistic gathering capabilities to track things directly from the site too.

Google Sitemap

The site will start generating a Google sitemap, which should help improve how our search results show up in the most popular search engine.

Menu

This is a de facto improvement that comes just with upgrading 4.7, but we can now create much nicer menus in the system than we could before.

Automatic Path names

No more "node/123" links! I've added this in to automatically create easier to read and link paths within the system. Anytime someone joins our site, they're user profile will be at "user/user_name" rather than "user/123". Similarly, whenever an event is created, it will be at "calendar/2006/08/13/some_event_name". There are still a few irritations to work out of the names being generated, but I'm much happier with the way this is working already. By the way, the old links still work too, so they won't be broken either.

That's what's already new. Now on to the stuff that I think's going to be freakin' cool.

Upcoming Features

Here's my wishlist:

Google Map Improvements/Location/Geocoding

I've already started playing with this a bit. One thing a lot of folks have asked for is an online directory. I've been thinking about how to do this and I think I can provide an online directory for members that will not compromise anyone's privacy.

In addition to providing a directory, I will be able to provide a map showing the map location of all our members on a single map. So, you'll be able to see how close you live to fellow New Hope members. This will probably include a more public way of publishing LIFE group and event locations as well.

Forums

I would like to add forums to the site. Drupal 4.7 now includes the ability to create a pretty decent forums system directly in site. I think we could have various forums for things, particularly site suggestions and problems. This will be combined with my next item...

Organic Groups

This is a feature added by the CivicSpace crowd to allow members of a Drupal site to create groups on an ad hoc basis. With some controls on the system, we could allow staff members and ministry leaders to create mini-sites in the system with their own stories, events, audio messages, forums, etc. I see this as being a really exciting feature for the web site with the potential to revolutionize the communications abilities of thte staff and other leaders.

Okay, that's not the full list of what I want to do, but that's plenty long enough. It will probably take some weeks before any of the latter bits are implemented and I'm still looking for and waiting to hear bug reports on this latest update.

Cheers.

I'm going to make this quick because Terri needs a counter-weight in bed (we have a waterbed) and I've already wasted much time responding to Slithy on Brent's blog on the history of sexual promiscuity in western society.

I've started the module update and have gotten most of the replacement modules installed that can be installed. However, I've had to get a replacement for the taxonomy_assoc module (as I thought I probably would), since that module has been discontinuied in favor of the Category module.

The Category module is a drop-in replacement for Taxonomy that replaces vocabularies with "containers" and terms with "categories". The difference is that both of these are now nodes. Not only this, but any content type can be treated as a container or category, effectively giving you a node for every term. Unfortunately, it's not quite as flexible in some ways as it doesn't seem to have a "folksonomy". Though, I haven't yet looked at it far enough. If it does have tagging or it can be added, I will probably migrate this site to it as well.

This module also replaces the Book module, but I haven't really looked into that since we don't use the Book module for anything at New Hope yet, though I think we might after talking to Dan and Tony a couple weeks ago.

Other than that, I've also added, but haven't tested the eventrepeat module. I've updated the various other modules that are available that I mentioned previously. I also need to see if Tony wants me to do anything to add image galleries, forums, and some other pieces. Finally, I think things are now to the point that Eric can start working on the design whenever he feels like it.

Cheers.

I've started the software update for the New Hope web site. I've got the main Drupal system updated, but I haven't started on the modules. I'm doing the updates to a copy of the site so the current site can still run in the meantime (so don't bother looking for changes as they won't show up until we're done).

The trickiest bit is going to be that some of the modules we use on the current site are used because Drupal was lacking certain features that it no longer lacks. The other tricky bit will be the modules that are being discontinued in favor of better solutions--i.e., I'll have to do some conversions.

Here's the list of modules that need to be updated:

• event. I also plan to install eventrepeat as part of this process so that we can start showing recurring events, like Sunday mornings and youth meetings.
• flexinode. I'm going to replace this module with the content construction kit if I can. If it will be too painful, I may leave this for an update in a month or two.
• form_mail. I don't know what to do with this. I don't know what is available for this functionality.
• forms. Ditto.
• notify. This will either be an upgrade or I'll use a better notification module (not that there are many good choices for this functionality, according to my recent research).
• sermon_customizations. I hacked in some functionality to make Podcasts and some other bits to work correctly. Most of this can probably be ripped back out.
• taxonomy_assoc. This module associates nodes with vocabularies and terms. This is used in some important places, so I'll have to see what to do about this one (or just update, if possible).
• taxonomy_context. I can't honestly remember what this does at the moment, but I think this is a ditto of the last comment.
• theme_editor. I'll have to find out from Eric if this is still needed. I may just turn it off.
• tiny_mce. This is important. This makes it possible for our staff to post to the site without knowing any HTML or special document formats. I'll probably need to discuss with other stakeholders what features to include in the future too. There has been some disagreement about which functionality should be available to authors.
• urlfilter. This is used to turn http://... strings into links when someone doesn't link a URL. This is probably a trivial update.

The last bit that I'll need to update is making sure the script I've written to allow Tony to upload recorded audio also gets a face lift. It'll surely need a few changes. I wrote this script to get around upload restrictions set on PHP code on our host and to help standardize the MP3 tags in the audio for the Podcasts.

That pretty well summarizes my plans for the next launch. Eric is going to be responsible for importing the design that Jay Risner has put together for New Hope. I hope we can get the first release knocked out by the first week of September. I'd like it to be before the students return, but that may not be realistic given the data conversion I'll have to perform and some of the remaining design questions Eric has. We'll get it done.

Cheers.