Today I want to talk about a few things that I’ve been working on lately.

  1. A CMS; and
  2. A web-based outreach complimented by cheap publishing

First though, I would like to complain about domain names. Part of the web-based outreach includes purchasing a suitable domain name: you know the sort, something catchy, to the point, really draws attention to your website. Sounds simple, there is only one problem. Any domain name consisting of a catchy phrase, or word is usually taken.

Now, don’t get me wrong, some of these domains are taken quite legitimately, either for commercial or individual purposes. Some may not even offer a website. I do not have a problem with these domains. At least they are being used. It is the domains that in an advertisers portfolio, the ones that all look the same, but have slightly different content for keywords in the domain name. Using domains in this manner is very, very, annoying. They’re usually for sale too. At the right ;-) price.

Perhaps an example would work better: godsword.com!!! While it would be somewhat amusing, I would not use the domain godsword.com – I need something less automatically associated with “religion”. However, even if preached incorrectly, a Christian message through godsword.com would be a useful, productive, and good use of the domain.

Of course this is nothing new, I’m not the first to complain, and surely I wont be the last.

Web-based Outreach
Web-based advertising is fairly ubiquitous. If you have searched with Google, you’ve seen it in the form of AdWords, and there are many more examples. Recently I have been working on a strategy to extend the web-advertising platform into a successful community awareness outreach. Measuring success is hard, but my chosen metric, at least in this case, is a measure of population who are conscious of the product existing. So this is what I had in mind:

  1. Run several simultaneous outreaches.
  2. Produce a web portal for each outreach, all through one website.
  3. Use AdWords and similar technologies to build Internet traffic.
  4. Compliment with paper publishing. People who see 100 eye-catching posters in a day are likely to research the posters origin (sorry no reference, just an opinion).
  5. A website branded information request form, allowing interested parties and the outreach coordinators to communicate.

Here are a few of my ideas

  • Get a Life The basic idea would be to explain the lifestyle (and benefits).
  • Free Light Essentially outlines tangible benefits received by allowing God influence in your life. [Earth courtesy NASA’s Earth Observatory.]
  • Got Five Minutes A very quick, literally 5 minutes, overview of beliefs.
 

Content Management System
I’ve also been working on a CMS. Yes, I know there are two-thousand-one-hundred-and-seventy-four CMS packages available already, many of which work wonderfully, and many of which are open source. I tried out a few, even tried extending one, in the end I felt writing from scratch would meet my requirements better. So what did I want:

  • Manage multiple unique sites (one for each Revival Centre location and then some extras).
  • Minimally provide contact details, meeting times and meeting locations for each assembly.
  • Provide a news feed on each site, eventually available to news readers (i.e. RSS, etc…).
  • Manage unique page content, an event calendar and a set of photo galleries for each site.
  • Appropriate user access control: user task filtering for each site, with a single sign on to manage all accessible sites.
  • XHTML1.1 Compliance (I have since changed this to mean XHTML1.1 compliance in browsers that support the appropriate mime type. Other browsers receive XHTML1.0 Transitional, however the markup should validate as XHTML1.1 if the xml and doctype declarations are modified.).
  • As the above implies: CSS styling, and for kicks, support for multiple themes on the front end.

The theming, access control, and XHTML1.1 compliance were hard enough to find, but to offer that for multiple sites… well as I said, writing from scratch appeared the best solution. This was a daunting task, don’t undertake it lightly, especially not in your free-time. I’m happy to say, that after 8ish weeks of on and off development and a few weeks off over Christmas/New Year, I have a product. This week I am going to undertake the task of porting the existing Newcastle Revival Centre website, fingers crossed there no more major bugs.

After deployment I might write about the steps involved in creating a CMS, this post is already too long. So, here is a list of some of the underlying packages I used to get this done:

  • PEAR. Specifically QuickForm (extended), Mail, Calendar, and Sigma templating.
  • The excellent famfamfam icon set.
  • jQuery.
  • Some fancy AJAX/AJAH to make a photo gallery similar to LightBox but without the pop-over effect.
  • TinyMCE.

Wow! This is a really long post. I’d really like some feed back on the web-based outreach idea. If you have domain suggestions email them to me, otherwise feel free to comment.

Andrew