other preparations for romans

So in conversations with my fellow Romans class leader, we decided that having a blog for the class would be a good idea for inspiring more conversation and connectedness.

I took on the project of creation.

And FUMCclass.com was born.

This week has been with many hours working in front of the computer screen working on this site. My associate is also the adult discipleship staff member, so he saw the vision of the site encompassing all of the classes and groups that he oversees.

This created the problem of designing a site that was manageable and expandable. I’m sure not if I have succeeded—though I’m not done I have gotten a lot of the initial setup complete—only time will tell if the levy will break, I guess.

Though my wife thinks I’m a genius with this stuff, it has been hard work trying to get everything worked out. I used wordpress as the foundation, mostly because I was already fairly familiar with it. As with all new venures, I have been able to try some new things out with the site design.

I have setup the class pages to be based off categories. I figure this would be a very easy way to manage the flow of information in dynamic fashion, without my continual tinkering. We will see if this will work. I figure this would be the easiest way to allow many people to post for different classes without them having to know too much. All they need to do is select their category—which I need to look into how to manage roles, it would be even better if I could limit who could post in which category.

I spent a lot of time looking at themes. This is always the worst part for me, because no theme is like I would want it to be. I have been toying around with the idea of creating my own theme for some time, and I think this recent work has only solitified that for me. After the initial learning curve, I could probably make a theme as fast as it takes to figure out someone else’s code and then edit it.

There are some neat tools that I used for this site.

Since a lot of the folks who will be using this site will probably not be extremely tech savy I wanted to make it extremely easy to stay connected via feeds. So I have created an subscribe by email which has both the posts and comments combined into it. I used yahoo pipes to combine the feeds, then feedburner to grab it from yahoo, then used feedburner’s email form to get people signed up.

I wish there was some way to have this combined feed created dynamically for each of the categories, because currently I have only created one combined feed for all the content on the site—which will work for the present time, but once traffic becomes higher it will become a lot more difficult for people to keep up only their class.

There are links to category specific feeds without comments right now, but I’m not sure how to combine that with the feedburner email form. The category feed links are created using the wp_list_categories() tag with the parameter of feed_image= added. I’m not sure how to get feedburner or yahoo pipes to grab that information without specifically telling it to. But then I would have to hand code each of the feeds for each category each time a new one is added.There must be a better way, that I’m just not seeing.

Something else I have added, to give people a place to see recent activity, is a three tabbed sidebar item which displays recent comments, recent posts, and popular posts. I found the code for the tabs through smashingmagazine.com. The recent comments and popular posts are through plugins and recent posts is via a nice code example on wordpress.org. {As a sidenote, if you try to use the popular posts plugin, you will need to find an edited version, via the wordpress forums, because the original version will not work with post 2.5 wordpres.}

This site also sports my first written php if else statement. I have a header image, and I wanted it to change depending on the category. So right now if you go to the site, you will see a default image which is cropped image of the colloseum, but when you go the Romans class it is a cropped image of a ancient statue. These images coincide with the images that are going on flyers and such around the church. So this should gain a sense of branding, or something like that, also it should add to sense of each category being independent of the others.

If you check the site out, please comment here about suggestions or any bugs you might see. I’m getting to the point where I can’t see my mistakes anymore because I have looked at it so much.