Engaging Net

Coral Ridge Church launches new web site

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Now online at crpc.org, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church’s new web site is authored by the church’s staff, with multimedia content such as audio files, photos, billboards and PDF documents as well as web-native news, events, activities and more. Engaging was tapped by WebLadyBug of Fort Lauderdale, FL to collaborate on designing and developing the content-managed site. Coral Ridge is the founding church of the Evangelism Explosion movement, which now has a presence in every nation of the world.

Coral Ridge, the Presbyterian church in Fort Lauderdale, FL that revolutionized evangelism and outreach in the 1980s, knew it was falling behind online. Its web site lacked a full- or even part-time team and often greeted visitors with a blank screen. The church contacted nearby web design agency WebLadyBug with a brief.

They wanted a warm, inviting, exciting site with up-to-date announcements, multimedia files to download, online registration forms and a calendar of their many events. WebLadyBug principal Teresa Robotham, seeking content management system expertise, teamed up with Engaging to design and develop the new site.

Solution

Content

The site’s architecture is a model of the church’s work. At its core are activities, parented by ministries and parents in turn to events. There are also departments, committees, projects, persons and roles. Members are handled separately, due mainly to the architecture of the content management system used, ExpressionEngine.

The core’s auxiliaries include photos and billboards, PDF documents, audio files and online forms. There are also various types of texts—news items, articles of interest, sermons, faqs and about us texts—and (not active at launch) opportunities to volunteer and work.

There is also workflow-related content seen only by authors and editors consisting of requests to fix bugs, change or add content and develop new features.

Workflow

A renowned organization with controversial positions, CRPC is concerned about the contents of all texts posted. Workflow is managed (not active at launch) by setting the status of a piece of content. Editors have access to a status that authors lack. If any author saves a change, the status reverts to one that is not displayed in templates and only an editor can restore the status that does display.

Better would be if the content reverts back to a previous version of the content sporting a displayable status. EE does have revisions but it would require at least a module or extension in the current version of EE (1.6.3) to meaningfully connect revisions with statuses.

And the homepage: how best to maintain control while keeping things fresh? Using status again, an editor can “homepage” an item, which is then displayed on the homepage according to its content type (news items in What’s New, events in Coming Up, etc.). When homepaged, an item also appears on a Ministry Page, though when Ministry Paged it does not appear on the homepage.

Design

Slideshow: Almost every page can have a number of photos, displayed as a slideshow. Mixed in with the photos can be related billboards, which are PowerPoint presentations produced by the church to hang in hallways and are now also exported as JPG files for the web site.

Blurbs: One required field in all core content is the blurb, which assists the title in representing the item when listed on pages other than its own. The discipline of blurbs must surely reap some rewards in terms of clicks on links. The blurb also serves as the lead-in on the item’s own page.

Accordions: To keep pages uncluttered yet be as informative as possible, accordions unfold throughout as signified by a zoom-in icon. With accordions—and blurbs—a ministry can post its entire staff, entire about us text, all its activities, its articles and projects of note, volunteer and work opportunities (coming soon), news and events and a slideshow—all on a single, quite simple-looking page.

Bible Verse: All core content items can have a chosen Bible verse, appearing in a fixed spot on every page as a link to the verse at BibleGateway.com.

Titles: Each page’s title, colored white over the image of the church’s organ and pulpit, is set to just touch the white body area, creating an unbroken shape.

Golden Ratio: As an aesthetic anchor, column widths were calculated using the Golden Ratio (1/1.618), dividing a standard 400-pixel photo by 1.62 to get 247px then dividing again by 1.62 to get 152px.

Menu: Across all pages the menu serves as navigation to much of the site, and any other page can be reached from an item within it. There are some two dozen menu items, each opening its own menu board with ample space to display a graphic such as “Location”’s Google Maps clip or “Founder”’s stills from the D. James Kennedy video tribute.

Presentation

Though they share the header, footer and slideshow, there are four main templates: homepage, ministry, multiple-entry and single-entry. The homepage is differentiated at a glance by having the slideshow on the left. Ministry pages are the most complex, gathering all the various types of content related to the ministry without the Homepage’s benefit of a single status. Multiple pages lack a photo gallery and are lists of items with single pages.

Auxiliary items are always related to core items, and each of these is inter-related, so that if a photo is attached to a news story about a concert performed on tour by a choir, then the system knows that this is a photo connected to that choir and in turn to its ministry. The architectural integrity of a tree is maintained.

Training

Ideally each item on a web site is authored by the person involved in that work, “authoring” meaning not only to write but to post and maintain in consultation with an editor, that is, to own. This benefits the site by eliminating areas fallen between the cracks and ignored and by surely improving the quality of the content both because the author is closest to it, thereby arguably more likely to inject the most telling of detail, and because there is now clear responsibility for it. Also, fully distributed authorship speeds up the posting process fantastically, eliminating the need to send the document to somebody else’s queue for processing, such as to post the changes into the system or to roll the presses. Without fully distributed authorship an up-to-date site would require a dedicated staff.

During two on-site weeks we enabled distributed authorship by training the designated authors in using the system, meeting one-on-one with all the people available. Some authors took to the slideshow, some to podcasting, and they are already helping each other where they can. It appears that a web authoring team is being forged.

Documentation

In process.

Future

Some features requested from the start are yet to be implemented, among them the calendar of events and online ticket ordering for the church’s Concert Series. Perhaps once all these bases are covered and the church’s vision for its web site is completely realized, the site will serve merely as the jumping-off point for Coral Ridge’s work on the web.

Results

“The website looks magnificent!” wrote Rene Barcelo, the project’s shepherd at the church, director of finance and a former IT man himself. “Now is just a matter of cleaning it up as we go.” We’re continuing to work. Today, ten days after launch, we introduced the workflow management setup.

Bestnetworksecurity.com switches from Joomla to ExpressionEngine

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

BestNetworkSecurity, a web site selling network security products and expertise, was running on the Joomla content management system and perplexing not only its users but even its owners. The site had various types of content, including products, vendors, seminars and articles, but all were being handled the same way. Things should be as simple as they can be, as a wise man once said, but no simpler. With the conversion to ExpressionEngine, we added enough complexity to the site architecture to simplify both its maintenance for the owners and its navigation for users.

On the original Joomla site, all the various types of content were lumped together, so to reap the benefits of running BestNetworkSecurity.com on ExpressionEngine the site had to be rearchitected. There was also a time factor, as BestNetworkSecurity.com had scheduled an online seminar and wanted the new site ready before then.

Solution

Talking via Skype, BestNetworkSecurity.com principal Jon Robinson and your author Engaging principal Adam Khan reviewed the site exhaustively in order to map out all its various types of content.

We then made these various types of content more manageable by using Mark Huot’s Nested Weblogs extension to group them into a handful of collection groups (Events, Marketing, Merchandise and Sales), each collection group in turn containing a more manageable small handful of collections.

One important breakthrough in the site’s architecture was understanding BestNetworkSecurity.com’s concept of Line Cards, which led to setting vendors and product families and lines as hierarchical categories rather than as content entries.

We then installed the standard Engaging melee of ExpressionEngine plugins and extensions:

• Find and Replace
• Textile
• Live-search
• Simplify Edit Table
• LG Add Sitename
• Clone Entries
• Edit Tab AJAX
• Category Checkboxes
• Textile Editor Helper

In order to better integrate member functionality such as logging in, registering for seminars and maintaining member profiles, we used the Solspace User and Freeform modules.

To help speed up the job and keep costs down, and as rather bright web folks themselves, BestNetworkSecurity.com followed along behind and did quite a bit of the job themselves.

And we discussed the site’s business goals, which helped us structure the new homepage and led to simple but important new features such as placing a quick contact form prominently and ubiquitously in the site-wide template header.

Results

Using categories for vendors and product families and lines made it easy to knit together various types of content. Any content about Sophos products, for example, whether a piece of merchandise, seminar, article, white paper, FAQ or datasheet, can easily list all the others. This architecture also enabled pages for the various product families and lines to show and link to their parent and child product and lines.

“We hired Adam because his skill at architecting our diverse information and mapping our feature requirements to Expression Engine was immediately apparent,” Jon wrote after the new site was launched on time and under budget. “He did a fabulous job unlocking us from our Joomla shackles and putting us on a platform that will allow our site to serve our customers more effectively. He was extremely responsive and offered skilled insight to our concerns and offered valuable input that guided us throughout the development process.”

Thank you Jon for the kind words, the opportunity to work with you on your site, and for your resolute faith once we got rolling.

Extreme Elements TV quits Joomla for ExpressionEngine

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Since Engaging doesn’t work with any content management system other than ExpressionEngine, it’s hard to say for sure whether it’s the best. But Florida-based Extreme Elements does—or rather, did: While Engaging built one site in EE for the adventure travel company, another agency built a second site in Joomla. After about a year Extreme Elements principal Paul Caswell threw in the towel with Joomla and asked Engaging to redo that second site in ExpressionEngine.

The web site for Extreme Elements TV, built using the free and open source Joomla content management system, was not only difficult to maintain, but parts of it were simply not working properly and eluding a fix. Extreme Elements principal Paul Caswell decided to abandon the system and asked Engaging to wrap the site within the installation of the ExpressionEngine content management system that powers the ExtremeElements.com site.

This required importing:

• content, comprised of video and blog entries
• members
• member comments
• statistics, such as number of views of each video

The client also wanted to add new navigation, features and content, such as search, multiple RSS feeds, breadcrumbs and a dynamic About Us section.

Solution

Engaging has now performed a quite number of data imports into ExpressionEngine, so even though this was the first from Joomla, the basic procedure was clear. Then, once the data was imported, the HTML and CSS was brought in from the old site, turning the pages into EE templates by placing EE tags within them.

We took advantage of EE’s new and wisely-engineered Multiple Site Manager, which enables the site owner to very easily navigate among an unlimited number of sites, and the sites themselves to easily access and display each other’s content.

Membership and participation is a vital aspect of this site, so we added the Stand-alone Entry Form to let members submit their own videos. This way user-submitted videos are added to the videos content stack, just where they’d be if added via the control panel by a site editor.

Results

One important business goal of the ExtremeElements.tv site is to promote the ExtremeElements.com site. Now that the two sites can access each other’s content, the .tv site can display context-sensitive travel information from the .com site to help send visitors to it.

Managing content is now easier in two ways. All content across the sites is added and edited on a single standardized interface. And due to the inter-relatedness of the content, less needs to be entered each time, since it’s available from pulldown menus. When adding a video about a competition, there’s no longer any need to enter the competition dates or location because that data’s already in there.

Another benefit of the change is that the two sites now share one member list.

And, most importantly, the thing now works!

Engaging scripts “amazing” date-based calculator

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

JavaScript is touted as a disruptive technology: many tasks previously done within desktop applications are now more easily doable for JavaScript-enabled web browsers. We’ve known this was coming—it’s why Microsoft was so desperate to kill Netscape, because it feared the web browser would become the new desktop—but like all technological revolutions, the change has come more slowly than we all thought. Here’s an extremely modest example of client-side programming that Engaging was asked to build.

The good ladybug at WebLadyBug of Fort Lauderdale, Florida asked Engaging to develop a calendar calculator script for a favorite client, Sunray Notice, a full-service construction notice company. Sunray wanted visitors to be able to select a first and last day of a construction job and be told how long they had to file “Notice to Owner” and “Claim of Lien” documents.

Solution

Since web users today expect to be able to select a date by picking it from a dynamic monthly calendar display, we chose the widely-used, stable and open-source Dynarch’s DHTML/Javascript Calendar.

The web page displays two Dynarch calendars, one for the first and one for the last construction day. When the user selects a date, the script converts it into a number that can be worked with, calculating whether the visitor still has time to file a Notice to Owner or Claim of Lien, or whether the time allowed to do so has expired, and displaying the results.

Results

When Sunray saw their idea unfolding onscreen, they came up with some refinements to the workings and the design. Once these too were implemented, Ariela Wagner, Business Development officer at Sunray, exclaimed “Amaaaaaaaazzzzzzzzzzzing!!!!!” and the calculator went online.

Manufacturer’s site layout fixed for IE6, IE7 browsers

Monday, May 14th, 2007

The subtle differences among web browsers can make producing HTML and CSS for a web site tedious and time-consuming. In particular, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, which dominated the market longer than it should have, creates problems for CSS coders because it has a number of insidious bugs and does not support some important CSS directives. Web pages that render properly on less popular but more standards-compliant and modern browers, such as Firefox, do not render properly on the older IE6 (or sometimes even the new IE7 for that matter).

BePrivy of Portland, Oregon were close to completing a new web site for a manufacturer of electronic equipment. But even as the site was displaying properly in Firefox, it was not in IE6 and IE7, and fixing it for those browers was becoming a drain on BePrivy’s time. They sought an HTML/CSS expert to fix the site for IE6 and IE7.

Solution

Having had plenty of experience with IE6 and IE7 issues while creating other sites, particularly the recent complex template at Extreme Elements, Engaging undertook the fix. It involved knowledge of the classic IE6 bugs, such as the 3-pixel jog, the lack of CSS directives min-height and max-height, and the retooling of some elements from absolutely positioned to floating. Although the CSS was stored in a relatively complex setup, there was nothing we hadn’t seen before in some way.

Results

As a result of the work, the new site now displays consistently across the browsers, and Jacob Reiff, BePrivy principal, concluded in an email: “Thanks so much for your help -— overall I’m very satisfied with the work you produced.”

Extreme Elements now blazingly static

Monday, April 30th, 2007

As both a travel store and a sports media destination, traffic at extremeelements.com spikes during competition time. With the new site’s complex pages her first outing was a disappointment, the server frequently becoming overwhelmed and collapsing. A workaround entitled “publish static” now provides a blazingly fast, stable site and at least one added benefit besides.

Extremeelements.com is one of those: very attractive but with a split personality. As an online travel store, traffic is relatively small, steady and growing, but as a media destination during world kiteboarding competitions, for which the site provides some of the most detailed and speedy news coverage, traffic spikes dramatically. The first world kiteboarding competition covered using the new Made with Engaging site was Movistar Kiteboarding World Cup 2007 in Isla Margarita, Venezuela and unfortunately the server collapsed frequently throughout the competition due to the traffic load.

The problem was that although each competition page on the site is designed to appear simple and straightforward, it is nonetheless chock-full of dynamic information, grabbing a number of daily commentaries, each in turn grabbing a couple of dozen photos, most of which grab at least one depicted competitor for their captions, each of which in turn grabs his or her sponsor. The page also grabs and lists all the hotels and centers at the competition location with whom Extreme Elements partners. This, combined with the rest of the template, which is also dynamic and packed with information, such as the latest three top-level travel offers, is pushing the envelope for the server at its current configuration. With the built-in caching system of the site’s ExpressionEngine content management system switched off, each page load requires many database queries, but with caching fully on, the server must make many reads and writes to lots of little cache files. Either way the server was overwhelmed.

Solution

The solution has been to create a static HTML version of the site, which is much simpler for the server. While the dynamically-generated version continues to exist alongside it, only site editors know the URL, so traffic to it is kept at almost zero. When site editors are logged in and view a dynamically-generated page, they see a small “publish static” button at the bottom right. When clicked, this button triggers a small CGI script that grabs the HTML output of the dynamic page from whence it was called, and writes it to a static HTML file using the same path.

Results

The result is that site editors can now get a live preview of their work and a website that loads blazingly fast, all ready for the next competition, PKRA 2007 Austria, Monday 30 April – Sunday 6 May, 2007.

“Perfect” new content management system for fabric fashion site

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

Without a content management system, maintaining the relatively simple Carolyn Strauss Collection website had become cumbersome and time-consuming. Vector Computer Consulting sought “a way to automate this process with a Content Management System (CMS) that can take care of the entire process of uploading, resizing, and adding collections to the navigation lists.” Engaging provided a solution, and upon trying it Vector principal Matt Weinberg christened it “perfect”.

Vector Computer Consulting Inc. of New York has been maintaining the relatively simple Carolyn Strauss Collection website since 2004. Each month a handful of new textile collections is introduced, with each collection consisting of a variety of images in a fixed format with some variations. Without a content management system however this process had become cumbersome and time-consuming. To quote the Functional Specification: “The Carolyn Strauss Collection seeks a way to automate this process with a Content Management System (CMS) that can take care of the entire process of uploading, resizing, and adding collections to the navigation lists.”

Moreover, the job would no longer be performed by Vector but by the site owner, who is a fashion designer not a computer consultant, so the entire process would have to be on one application, without Photoshop for image editing, for example, or an FTP client for file uploads.

Solution

Vector agreed that rather than creating a bespoke set of scripts, the ExpressionEngine CMS could handle the task easily, and though EE is not free software and may appear to be overkill for this site, it would be quicker and therefore cheaper to do the job by configuring this robust CMS than by rolling a new set of scripts. Plus, having the site sit upon a powerful CMS would make it easy to add more functionality in the future, such as a mailing list or an RSS feed.

The solution utilizes EE’s photo gallery module to automate the uploading and processing of images and thumbnails, even rotating and cropping where required. The collections are then displayed using the regular weblog module.

This solution allowed for a completely linear content management process that Vector could write up as a series of instructions for the client to follow.

Results

“PERFECT!!!!” exclaimed Vector principal Matt Weinberg in an email. “I’m extremely impressed you were able to pull this off.”

Archaeological Center auction #40 biggest yet

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

Because this auction was so unusually large, the printed catalog could not be delivered to international bidders in time, so they relied on the website alone to view lots and make pre-auction bids on them.

Twice a year the Archaeological Center holds an antiquities auction at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. The most recent, Auction #40: Ancient Coins, The Arnold Spaer Collection of Weights & Bullae, and Antiquities, was the biggest yet, with 876 items.

To date, posting each auction online has served to supplement its black & white printed catalog by providing color images of the items. It has also served the public interest by forming an online exhibition of sorts, capturing antiquities for publication as they surface briefy between private collections. This time however, due to the unusually large number of items, the printing of the catalog was delayed until after the date of the auction, meaning that bidders who could not travel to Tel Aviv to view the auction items at the Archaeological Center showroom relied on the website to view auction lots.

In addition, the new pre-auction bidding sheet system ran for the second time and many used it to submit pre-auction bids. The bidding sheet works like an online shopping cart. It uses the NebuCart package to merge seamlessly with ExpressionEngine, the site’s content management system.

The Archaeological Center website has been made with Engaging since 1997.