We have two scenarios where we use wordpress - one is when we have a static site managed outside of WP and then /blog is our WP blog, and the other (more typical) is where WP is managing the entire site. Since the latter is more common I’ll address that here.

Our folder structure:

• {WWW_ROOT}/domain.org
  • plugins
  • themes
  • uploads
  • web

The document root for the site is the web folder, and then we can version control the plugins and themes folders. In order to get WordPress to work with this setup I created symbolic links from those folders to their normal location in the wp-content folder:

$ cd {WWW_ROOT}/domain.org/web/wp-content

$ ls -l

index.php
plugins -> {WWW_ROOT}/domain.org/plugins
themes -> {WWW_ROOT}/domain.org/themes
uploads -> {WWW_ROOT}/domain.org/uploads

The one caveat to this setup is that some WP plugins do not play nicely with those symbolic links, notably the WP-Contact Form plugin. A minor change to that plugins settings fixed that.

More later on how we’re using Coda and SVN to manage this.

Every couple of months or so we get a request for embedding a video within an email. Our immediate reaction is to do a spit take (I think I actually did one once), so we wanted to let you know why this makes us shudder to think about. The answer will always be no, and here’s why:

1) There is the question of web standards and quality.
Wait, why are you talking about the “web?” This is about emails. Yes, yes, an email now-a-days is basically a un-glorified web page. I say un-glorified because, while it gives you the ability to have pictures and different colors and fonts and stuff, it doesn’t let you take advantage of 98% of the aspects of a web page. There are no css files, no forms, no includes, no jquery and NO EMBEDDING OF VIDEO.

On the web you can embed a video, and you can also set the option of having it auto-play or have the user click to play. At first thought, “autoplay’ sounds good - one less step the user has to take to enjoy your wonderful cinematic experience. Normally the less clicks the user has to take, the better. This is not true with video. Ask any web monkey what they think of “autoplay” and they will give you a look of horror and disgust (similar to asking about using comic sans on a page). Imagine opening up an email and suddenly having someone start talking to you. Better yet, take 3 out of 4 random spam emails from your spam folder and imagine them in video form. Not a pretty picture huh? So this is case #1 against the concept of embedding the video in an email.

2) Email is for text. Web pages are for multimedia.
45 years ago Email was originally created for the sending of text and the ATTACHMENT of multimedia (i.e. images/video). The web was created, and is used, to display text/images/video/flash/forms etc. That is why it was created and has evolved to what it is today. While still not standardized 100%, the web is pretty refined and we know that there are 4 commonly used browsers we can develop for (IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome (sorry Opera and all Linux browsers)). This brings me to #3.

3) Your favorite email client is not everyone’s favorite.
Do you use Gmail? Yahoo? Hotmail? Eudora? Thunderbird? Apple Mail? I could go on. There are too many email clients that treat/render HTML incorrectly, if at all! Even if it displayed it properly, some clients block or send to spam emails that have too much code in them. Javascript? Nope, not in email. And for good reasons, too.

4) What about phones, Blackberrys, etc.
How many emails do you get a day that don’t look right? Those emails probably use images so imagine getting a video email. What do you see instead? Do you get a broken email that uses images as the fail-safe? How many broken emails do you get that don’t have text as a fail-safe? Insert can-of-worms here.

So to sum things up: Email is not the medium for this type of multimedia. While I understand the enthusiasm about sending an email with a video in it, I do not agree with trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

Validation as a debugging tool
While contemporary Web browsers do an increasingly good job of parsing even the worst HTML “tag soup”, some errors are not always caught gracefully. Very often, different software on different platforms will not handle errors in a similar fashion, making it extremely difficult to apply style or layout consistently.

When surveyed, a large majority of Web professionals will state that validation errors is the first thing they will check whenever they run into a Web styling or scripting bug.

I know that we do this for new projects, It is a great starting point for trying to figure our why /new/ problems are occuring as well as just a great double check to your own code.

Validation as a future-proof quality check
Checking that a page “displays fine” in several contemporary browsers may be a reasonable insurance that the page will “work” today, but it does not guarantee that it will work tomorrow.

Validation is one of the simplest ways to check whether a page is built in accordance with Web standards, and provides one of the most reliable guarantee that future Web platforms will handle it as designed.
Validation is a /starting point/ to figure out bugs, If you can prove that your site is valid, you can also rule out a lot of possible problems with it and discover the actual problem with your site.

Validation eases maintenance
It is reasonable to consider that standards such as HTML and CSS are a form of “coding style” which is globally agreed upon. Creating Web pages or applications according to a widely accepted coding style makes them easier to maintain, even if the maintenance and evolution is performed by someone else.
I completely agree with this, If sites are coded with standards then /anyone/ can come in and update them with ease. Understanding that /you/ might not be the one in charge of the site within the next 2 or 5 years is key.

Validation helps teach good practices
yes, I think we’ve covered this by now.

Validation is a sign of professionalism
As of today, there is little or no certification for Web professionals, and only few universities teach Web technologies, leaving most Web-smiths to learn by themselves, with varied success. Seasoned, able professionals will take pride in creating Web content using semantic and well-formed markup, separation of style and content, etc. Validation can then be used as a quick check to determine whether the code is the clean work of a seasoned HTML author, or quickly hacked-together tag soup.

I feel weird about this one, but I agree with it. If you hire a development firm to… say… design and develop a new template/system for a significant web property that you own, you would expect the final product would validate!

So, what have we learned here?
Validate to check your code, its another pair of eyes which we all know is very useful in the IT world.
Validate as a leveling ground for bug tracking, if you know your code is properly formatted then you have a place to start with debugging user issues.
Validate as a statement of professionalism, consider your customer and think of them “secretly” checking the validity of your work and to their chagrin it validates! that gives you +1 internets!

Source: validator.w3.org

Countdown Timer - this plugin makes it very easy to have a countdown clock on your site. We’ve used this quite a bit to count down to events, like a Night of Worship or the next KidStuf Live. We have even used it in a behind-the-scenes, invisible manner to kick off an action at a specific point in time using the callback methods.

• Plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/countdown2
• Example: http://northpointonline.tv/

Slideshow / Cycle - a simple plugin that allows you to create a quick slideshow or cycle feature. There are some basic animation effects that can be configured as well. One of our main uses of it is as a revolving banner area on our home page to show featured events and announcements.

• Plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/cycle
• Example: http://northpoint.org/

Table Sorter - sorts table columns based on pre-defined criteria and/or user action. You can configure it to default sort on a specific column, prohibit sorting on certain columns, etc. Very useful wherever you’re displaying tabular data.

• Plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/tablesorter
• Example: http://goglobalx.org/go

Kwicks - menu animation feature that slides open columns in a menu with a nice effect.

• Plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/kwicks
• Example: http://northpoint.org/ (Quick Links at the top of the page - effect shows as you hover over different columns)

Simple Modal - there are a lot of different light box plugins out there, and they all have pros and cons. This one is pretty simple to configure with CSS and allows any type of content in the modal dialog. We’re using it in several places.

• Plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/SimpleModal
• Example: http://insidenorthpoint.org/groups/group-life-resources/video/ (click on one of the video thumbnails)

Form Validation - there are also a bunch of different plugins that facilitate client-side validation on forms. This one can be configured to do a whole lot, but we’ve found that keeping it to a minimum yields the most consistent results.

• Plugin: http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Validation
• Example: http://kidstuf.com/site/invite

Got jQuery?

Since we’re aiming to help our ministry customers reach their audience, we find ourselves constantly addressing the issue of Content Management. At the onset of a new project we meet with our internal ministry customer and discuss their content needs. The following questions help us determine what the best approach might be:

• What content on the site is dynamic and what is static?
• How often will the dynamic content change?
• And, most importantly, who will own the responsibility for updating the dynamic content?

The answers to these questions help us to determine if a Content Management System is needed, or if it would be simpler to just handle content updates through our support team. If there is limited dynamic content and it only changes twice a year it’s much easier to just code those changes with our technical support resources. But if there will be constant updates to many pages, then it’s certainly worth the effort to deploy a CMS and train the ministry users on how to update their content.

This, of course, leads to a discussion of different CMS platforms, and there are a ton of comparisons online and an extensive listing on Wikipedia. Our two favorites at the moment are WordPress and Expression Engine. We are using both of those platforms fairly extensively, and they each have their advantages and disadvantages; but that’s a discussion for another time.

What are you doing for Content Management?

Have you thought about these questions? All too often church websites become dumping grounds for any and all information about every ministry, event, and service your church has ever or will ever have. The result is information overload.

It’s not difficult to see how this happens. Your website’s home page is prime online real estate and every ministry in the church wants a piece of it. We’re all too familiar with this at North Point. We don’t want to indiscriminately say no to certain ministries and yes to others, but we also don’t want our website to become an ugly jumbled mess.

That’s why you MUST have a strategy for your church website. If your website exists to get outsiders to your Sunday service, then you probably don’t want information about your upcoming elder election on your home page. If your site is primarily for members and regular attenders then that might be appropriate.

Having a well thought out strategy gives you a clearly defined criteria of what is appropriate content for your website. Spend some time this week thinking about your web strategy. In a future post, I’ll go over North Point’s web strategy and how it has evolved to what it is today.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the new InsideOutStudents.org!

One of the fantastic things about this new launch is that we’ve moved from an all-flash-based environment to a Wordpress-MU install.

Why?

Because of the sheer flexibility, dynamic content generation, and management simplicity. This gives our ministry teams the ability to be autonomous with their updates, meaning, they don’t have to come back to the web team for updates and changes every time they need to change a date.

If you’d like to read more about Wordpress-MU, Russell’s got a good primer here talking about our use of it for the InsideNorthpoint.org site.

We’d love to hear your feedback!

We started with the current design and built off of it. If you’ve got a good looking site, don’t feel the need to drastically change it every time you do an upgrade. This allows you to fix the problems you know about as opposed to creating a whole new set of problems.

In the old design, it took on average 3-5 clicks to find what you were looking for. In our redesign, we wanted to bring that down to 1-2 clicks. We did this by adding a “Quick Links” drop down to the top of ever page of the site. Once clicked, a site index drops down from the top and gives you easy access to everything on the site. That’s two clicks to get to anything on our site. Huge improvement.

Another goal was to prominently feature four main options on the home page. They are:

• New To North Point - A new area of the site with videos that show someone who’s never been exactly what to expect on their first visit to North Point.
• Get Involved - We wanted to use the site to encourage regular attenders to take that next step into community group or strategic service.
• Messages - Our most popular area of the site!
• Invite a Friend - One goal was to give our regular attenders an easy way to invite their friends.

Lastly, we wanted to give some home page real estate to our biggest ministry areas. The content area at the bottom of the page has environment descriptions and upcoming events for our married adults, single adults, students, and kids ministries. We decided to make the menu roll-over triggered so getting to this information doesn’t even require a click!

Overall we’re really happy with the redesign and are anxious to start getting feedback. The great thing about websites is that they’re never really done.  We’re always working to make them better, so please, leave a comment and tell us what you think!

Platform:

We chose WordPress µ for insidenorthpoint.org for several reasons:

• Using a single installation simplifies our administration of all of the different areas of the site.
• It’s very simple to add a new blog, so when we have a need to add a new area, it really is just a few mouse clicks.
• It is a lot easier to utilize the same theme and plugins across all of the blogs.
• A single user administration area simplifies things and allows for granular control of user permissions.
• Some of our ministry areas are very interested in blogging, while others really wanted more of a standard website. WP MU allows us to provide either one or both.

All of these are pretty much “WordPress µ 101″ basics, so it was a fairly obvious choice. This was our first site using WP MU, and our experience has been very positive and we will certainly consider using it for future projects.

Design:

One of our goals for the design of this site was to provide a common structure throughout the site, yet allow each ministry area to brand their area of the site as they wished. We chose to base our design on the Fresh News theme by Woo Themes. It provided a lot of great features out of the box, and we were able to customize it pretty easily to suit our needs. The design is based on the Grid Design pattern and uses a 16-column 960 grid as its foundation.

Functionality:

For the most part all of the areas on the site use standard WordPress functionality. We did add a few common WordPress plugins to make it easier for our ministries to embed videos, collect stats, etc., and we even wrote a couple of plugins for some specific needs. If you check out the Branding & Promotion pages in the Group Life area you’ll see a Flash video thumbnail gallery that we created to allow our Groups team to embed several videos on a single page. 

If you have any specific questions about the site just let us know.