Hey all, I’ve been way too busy and sleepless to post this week… but I’ll have a lot to say once we launch our new site at Generals International to promote the Light the Highway movement. I could probably post three pages just on things I’ve learned again in this project like “Don’t be a hero.”
Anyway, I’ve been trying to stay up to date on the Where 2.0 conference through O’Reilly Radar. Check out the Google Maps announcements:
I’ve been pretty busy trying to catch up on my RSS feeds and found some great posts from Jason Reynolds over at Bspotted.com. You may not have heard of him, but I’m sure you will (he’s spoken at NRB and MinistryCon). He’s a great “big-picture” thinker in web strategies and friend of mine from the Typo3 Dallas Users Group.
What Ministry Technology, Church IT, and Web Ministry People Have in Common
From Bubble Graphs to Mind Maps (I’ve used the software he talks about, FreeMind, on recent projects and I’m addicted.)
A CMS (Content Management System) is always a consideration when you’re starting to design a large or often updated site. My personal favorite is Typo3 because of the many ways I’ve seen it modified and even because I really agree with the philosophy of the founder, Kasper. One place where the CMS isn’t considered enough, though, is in the small 5-6 page site. I have three reasons from my personal experience that I’d recommend at least considering a CMS like Typo3 for even the smallest sites.
1. Faster design templating. It’s taken for granted now that it’s easier & faster to update a large site with templates of some kind. The problem comes in, though, when you look at how the template engine from many systems fits into your workflow. Many engines assume you want to start by building a template from scratch that will follow their proprietary rules, but that just doesn’t fit with the fastest workflow in most cases. Your workflow probably involves an example page for yourself, your boss, or your client complete with temporary content designed in a WYSIWYG or graphical editor (Dreamweaver, GoLive, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). Unfortunately, to build a template from this you need to either painstakingly modify your source by hand or simply start with a pre-existing template and just modify it to “match” your needs. To be honest, this doesn’t scale if you’re only using that template five times. The TemplaVoila engine in Typo3 changes this, though. Kasper shows here how quickly you can take a fully-functional HTML/CSS example page and turn it into a working CMS template for Typo3. How does this apply to your small site? If you’re building a quick site, you don’t want to spend all your time turning your idea into a template, but if you can go from design to template in 10-15 minutes, then you have saved yourself real time even for a small number of pages.
2. Extensibility. This is pretty much a necessity today in the rapid development environment. The web today recognizes the sites that can grow and adapt quickly to changes. There is almost no feeling as miserable as the last-minute feature requests that make you rethink the entire scope of a project two days before launch. At the same time, there’s a special joy near the end of a development cycle when you or a client think of that final feature and you know that you have the architecture in place to support it. In the last few months, I’ve had one small site (that will be launching soon) where the owner requested a special “clients only” environment in the final stages (I just had to add some extensions to the existing Typo3 structure) and another small site that I thought could use an RSS feed for updates (I just had to add some functionality to their Typo3 system). Even though the sites started out small and stayed small in page size, the ability to add intelligent features like newsfeeds and logins saved hours of rework and gave them genuinely useful features.
3. Pre-Launch Workflow. Once again, if you’re looking at a big site then you’ve already thought of the maintenance benefits in the long run when using a CMS. The pre-launch and development workflow is why I use Typo3 on every site except for a few, though (Wordpress and Mediawiki are sill irreplaceable). Using Typo3 from the beginning gives a clear separation of content, design, and extended functionality. I’ve managed to create a very fluid process of parallel development this way. As soon as I complete the first draft of the templates, content can start being added by others. Then, while they’re adding content, I can finalize the template or work on implementing extended features like calendars, image galleries, etc. Even if we completely change the direction of the template, their work on adding content is not lost and the site is moving forward while we’re working out the last details.
This isn’t a list of everything great about CMSes or anything truly revolutionary for most web developers, honestly. It’s just three of my own reasons for using a complete CMS like Typo3 on a site, no matter what the original scope of the site is. Even if you’re building a site that will only be up two months for a promotional campaign, I know some amazing designers who will use Typo3. CMSes are easily available and can really improve the initial development phase on so many projects that I would reconsider if you’re not using them more. I know I never understood the guys who used a “complex” system for every site until I ran into the need for a template workflow, last-minutes features, and projects delayed waiting for content to be added.
By the way, I don’t plan on writing every piece of text on this site, so don’t worry. There’s plenty of more experienced writers and developers out there that I respect, so I’ll link to them as new things come across my newsfeeds (I use Vienna on my Mac).
It is time for a change at PocketRevolutionary.com. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to wax about all things random and theological, but I’ve decided in the past few weeks to take a serious look at the focus for PocketRevolutionary. I’ve realized that my heart is in the subjects I end up talking about every day in my non-blog life: the web, Web 2.0, new technologies and strategies, and how these things affect ministries and the Christian marketplace.
My main goal in my non-blog life is to build systems and new strategies for ministries and a few Christian-owned businesses. As much as I may listen to Ravi Zacharias, Bill Johnson, Cindy Jacobs, etc., I realize that’s not my voice or my mission for right now. I like internetmonk.com, but I flag and read PhilCooke.com and tech blogs obsessively. Why? Because they talking about practical things that are necessary for using “new media” in ministries today. So, I’ve decided to find my own voice in blogging (the same thing I’ve told others to do before). I may like to read Bonhoeffer on the weekends, but my weekdays are spent creating wiki communities, helping my friends start successful blogs, or training the staff at Generals International on using project management software. The questions I’m asked have more to do with web technology than my theology of grace.
So, this is the day of a “re-imagining” at PocketRevolutionary. I want this site to be a friendly guide for those in the field of “2.0″ ministry today. This is my small handbook for the revolutionaries; your “pocket revolutionary.” My goal is to really make this an interactive place for discussions of the issues we run into and ways that we can push the boundaries. I’m always open for more input in the comments and at my email. I’ll keep the old posts because I know there was a few readers back then, but I’ll pull them down and archive them “off-site” for now. I’ll still post my personal thoughts and stories, but I’ll at least try to tie them to the central focus of using technology.
Future blog ideas (in no particular order): ministry blogs, Typo3, MySpace, YouTube, GTD, software picks, Apple, productivity, OmniPlan, OmniFocus, wikis, Google Maps, TextMate. I’m sure more things will come up as I pore through my own news feeds. Let me know if you have any other ideas.
