Raunds Methodist Site is live with Leonardo

Well despite what I wrote in 42: Leonardo progress the site for Raunds Methodist Church is up and is running Leonardo.

To get to this point you need to be using Leonardo from subversion release 376 and then apply 3 sets of patches that I have sent to the mailing list (page_template from lfs, filesystem bug fix and logged in&out templates from lfs). Hopefully these will be integrated into subversion fairly soon.

The longest task was finding how to get mod_rewrite to work properly within the fairly limited hosting facilities (only .htaccess for control and ScriptAlias and RewriteLogLevel not supported). You can read about my solution on the Leonardo mailing list (and any experts comments are very welcome).

So far content is not very exciting - unlike our worship and wider church life.

At least I can now update the site from anywhere with a web browser and internet connection and so can any member of the congregation. Not only that but they don't need to learn html as the site supports a wiki style syntax as well as xhtml.

I may update a little more tonight as with my first communion service at Raunds in the morning sleep is not coming easily.

Comments

[Richard Hall]

Doesn't seem to be working this pm, Dave. :o(

[DaveW]

Richard,

It just depends when your pm is because it is back now. A dodgy ftp client (on my windows machine) had clobbered all the mod_rewrite rules.

Fortunately backups are still ingrained.

[Richard Hall]

I like it -- simple and clean looking. Mr Wesley would approve! ;)

[the_methotaku]

It's a decent utillitarian site- it explains everything a first-time visitor would need to know to get to the church. OTOH it has nothing to draw visitors to the church. A picture of the outside of the church would add flair to the site and help people find the church. A picture of the inside of the church during worship would also be useful- such pictures are a good way of coveying the feel of how a chucrch worships in a way that words can't.

All in all though, a plain but functioning website is better then no website, which is what my current church has.

[DaveW]

Absolutely agree, it is totally graphically boring at the moment. I am collecting images (and more importantly permissions) at the moment. So there will be stuff added.

The one easy one is pictures of the outside of the building BUT the church is not the building but the community of people and I want to emphasise that by not making the building the focus of the site.

The site was also a rush job when I suddenly found we had the url on the new noticeboard and no site there ;-)

[Turbulent Cleric]

Dave, I am a bit of an ignoramus re computing (and theology I sometimes think) but I am planning to set up a website for my local church.

Do you have any recommendations?

[DaveW]

Hi Turbulent ;-)

I want to write a whole post to answer better. However, til then I think the key is to get a content management system installed. I am thinking of a free software solution that allows you to edit the content of the site from anywhere on the internet. Then you can gets lots of people involved in writing for the site.

I would like to get leonardo to the point where I can offer simple sign up so that I can offer hosting complete with Leonardo installed and setup ready to start typing in your content. But I am a little way off yet.

Try looking at solutions like Wordpress. Basically you want to avoid needing to learn html and you want to avoid writing the site on one machine and then sending it to the internet. A system which presents you with a number of design choices rather than writing from scratch will also help.