IT / Web

If you’re anything like us, you’ve got more than enough work to keep your team busy. The appetite for web sites and applications continues to grow at a frenetic pace, and the ministry teams we support have no shortage of great ideas. And, of course, we all love to work on projects that come with new challenges, cutting-edge technologies, and high impact. Yet, in the midst of all of this activity, we cannot neglect the technology infrastructure that allows us to provide these great services to our ministries and their audience.

One particular challenge that we’ve been discussing lately is upgrades. There are many different schools of thought on this one - some could be considered “early adopters”, choosing to upgrade their systems with every new release. This is attractive in that you’re always up-to-date should any problems with your infrastructure arise, and you get the new features as soon as they come out. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those that never upgrade unless they encounter a problem - “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

One of the by-products of our organization’s strategy to be a “House of Brands” is that we have a lot of different sites running on a variety of platforms, so we’ve recently started putting together a strategy for how and when to upgrade our systems. This includes the following, to name a few:

• Operating Systems for our web servers and database servers (Red Hat Linux and Windows Server)
• Database Systems (MySQL and Microsoft SQL)
• WordPress, WordPress MU, and Expression Engine content management systems
• Church Management Systems
• Java and .NET
• jQuery

We’re more than a little overdue to implement a proactive strategy around how we want to keep these systems up-to-date, but we are working on it and getting better. Whether you have one site or many to manage, it is prudent to sit down and figure out what strategy fits your organization best.

What’s your upgrade strategy?

Email Newsletters are still all the rage. Sometimes, on a bad day, I just wish they would go away.

It’s probably because I’m over email newsletter systems; most of them just don’t work well and cross-browser and email client testing can be such a hassle.

But, it’s still a significant part of how we communicate to our congregation, partners, and organization. I don’t see it going away anytime soon.

So the only logical choice is making sure we have the most robust emailing system available. We’ve been using one such system, Constant Contact, and it’s done an ok job so far, but we’re always on the lookout for other systems to either compare or contrast feature sets and functionalities.

Do you have any recommendations? What does your ministry use?

Let’s admit it. We’re human, and as human beings go we’re not very good at being “perfect.”

This obviously complicates everything the moment we get in teams. To think that we even have the capacity to do anything productive without killing each other! But, we do.

So, as a result, not only do we need to be more cognizant of who we are individually (and how we can improve ourselves) but also our team. As a result, we’re going through Patrick Lencioni’s book The Five Disfunctions of a Team together!

I think it shall be grand. The first step in making things better is admitting that they need to get better! And, we can always do better.

So, how are you building up your web team? Are you guys going through anything together?

One of our goals for this year is to continue to solidify how we launch web properties and products. Process is what we’re looking for!

We’re caught between two worlds though (and you’re probably as familiar as we are with these two); our desire to be fast, agile, and responsive as well as making sure that we can keep standards and boundaries for requests.

One of the ways in which we’re making headway is by starting to really leverage a number of web-based services and applications. For example, we’re using Basecamp for some of our project management.

It’s never too early (or late) to start developing process around your web projects. How are you doing that with your team?

Being a “mega-church” has it’s perks…cool buildings, great music, great messages, and thousands of people to join in community with.

But, being a “mega-church” also has its issues.

One of the biggest issues that our Web Team faces is being bombarded with “How did you do _____?” questions. Please don’t misunderstand me here, we LOVE helping other church leaders find their way in the crazy World Wide Web, but literally answering 50-100 phone calls and emails a week regarding “How’d ya do that?” was getting a bit much.

Now, this may seem simple to you (and why we haven’t done this sooner, I’ll never know!), but we have created a FAQs page to direct people to when they have specific questions. This page will be available very soon, and we will be happy to point everyone to it! I will even be changing my voice mail to say the following:

You have reached Amber Castleberry with North Point Ministries. If you have a question regarding how our Web Team has created or designed any portion of our website, please go to this URL _________ where you will most likely find your question (and many more) answered. All other inquiries, please leave a message. Thanks, and have a great day!

–

Please check back soon to find our shared FAQs page. And, if you have a question…feel free to drop one in the comments section - it may just end up being answered very soon!

One of the biggest tools in our toolbox lately is jQuery. Just about every site we create these days has at least one jQuery feature or plugin that we’re using. If you’ve read this far and your eyes haven’t rolled back in your head, then you most likely know what jQuery is and probably also know that there is no shortage of web pages and articles about jQuery. This is by no means a comprehensive look at using jQuery, but we thought we’d share some of the plugins we’ve found very useful.

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?

We’ve spent some time recently cleaning up.  This may not seem like fun to most people, but I actually enjoy it.

We are frequently updating our sites with new designs, technologies, and features, but we often neglect to decommission or delete our old stuff.  Sometimes we don’t want to get rid of things because we want to be able to roll back in case of problems, or we think that the old information may have some value at a later date.

Storage is cheap these days, so it may seem like a waste of time to look backwards and clean up your mess.  While I certainly don’t want to spend a majority of my time cleaning up, I think it is an important thing to do.

Here are some things to consider:

• Will your old data cause confusion and delay when you or someone else needs to work on your current system?
• Are you paying to backup old data?
• Could your old system cause a security problem down the road?

I’ve started creating calendar reminders to delete data and decommission systems when I feel that it will be safe.  We also have some processes in place that clean up our old log files automatically.

Are you being proactive and cleaning up, or do you wait until your disk is full?

Web technologies and design trends are constantly changing. That’s why it’s important to keep up to date. We do this by reading the following blogs:

• Smashing Magazine - If you read just one web development/design blog, read this one.  Smashing has incredibly in-depth articles that cover the entire spectrum of web design/development. Everything from user interface to advanced typography, this blog has it all. They also regularly examine UI and design trends and include numerous examples.
• Noupe - Just recently purchased by Smashing Magazine, Noupe.com covers many of the same topics, but tends to go a little deeper. Noupe.com has a lot of specific examples of code that you can use on your site.
• WebAppers - This site has tons of useful code examples. Their snippets regularly find their way into our websites.
• CSS Tricks - A great resource for CSS related tips and tricks.

What web development blogs are you reading?

The GoGlobalX.org site re-launched silently this past weekend with a new backend: Wordpress.

One of the key considerations for the GlobalX team was the ability to update the site easily without having to ask the IT and Web team every single time.

We agreed that this was a pretty good idea, naturally.

One of the components that wasn’t originally a part of the design was a blog. This was also a key consideration when considering alternative platforms. Wordpress is a great blogging platform and we knew that we could include that with ease.

Enjoy, and go sign up!

We seem to be getting more and more requests to include RSS feeds from various blogs or social networking sites (mostly Twitter) on our various sites, so we have spent a little time checking out many of the plugins and source code that’s available all over the web. For the most part these plugins work perfectly, but when the RSS feed site is having issues (not that Twitter ever has any), some of these plugins don’t behave very well. Most of them are contacting the RSS feed using server-side code, and when the feed is slow or throws an error it sometimes causes the page not to load. This caused us major headaches when our site monitoring systems were looking at a page that contained one of these plugins.

So the obvious answer is to use Ajax and load the feed asynchronously. jQuery makes loading in xml or json data super simple.

   $.get("http://feedurl.com/feed.rss", 
            { name: "value" }, 
            functionThatDisplaysFeed );

Or use the .getJson jQuery method to fetch json data and use that. The functionThatDisplaysFeed should simply read the returned data, which for an RSS feed is XML, and figure out what to do with it on the screen.

But here’s the problem … your browser won’t let you do this if the feed is not coming from the same domain as your web page. To get around this you must implement a server-side proxy that will read the feed and return the contents in some fashion to the browser. We found a free downloadable RSS aggregator proxy called SimplePie - just following a couple of the examples to create our own version that also caches the feed was pretty easy. Here’s the new jQuery:

    $.get('rss/rss_proxy.php',
             { feed: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/buckheadchurch.rss', limit: 5 },
	     function(data) {$("#bcblogfeed").html(data).show('slow');}
    );

In this instance we had the rss_proxy.php file do the heavy lifting on parsing the XML feed and creating the HTML, but we could have just as easily passed the XML back to the browser and done that in jQuery. Here are the key lines in our PHP proxy:

// invoke the SimplePie library - $feedParam & $limit are passed in to the rss_proxy.php as get parameters
$feed = new SimplePie();
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) $feedParam = stripslashes($feedParam);
$feed->set_feed_url($feedParam);
$feed->set_item_limit($limit);
$feed->init();
$feed->handle_content_type();
 
// go through the returned data and pull out the information you want from the feed
if ($feed->data) {
   foreach($feed->get_items(0,$limit) as $item) {
      // use the SimplePie API to pull information out of the item object
      <a href="<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>">
           <?php echo $item->get_title(); ?></a>
           <span class="rss-date"><?php echo $item->get_date('j M Y'); ?></span>
   }
}

Comment if you’d like to see the full code or have any questions.