Golden Anvil

Well, our new church website has finally gone live. If you are interested in taking a look, you can see it here.

You might be able to tell that I built it using the same software that I'm using for this website. It's called drupal, and I've grown quite fond of it. It is very flexible, and very powerful. On the church website I've put a whole publishing workflow into place so that each post that a blogger writes up has to go through me (for basic editing) and then our pastor (for blasphemy checking, as we like to (semi) jokingly say). Then it gets placed in a queue for later publishing. It's all very slick.

Anyway, there are still some things I want to tweak about the site, but I think it basically works, and it needs to stop sitting on the back burner.

In case you are interested, the current plan is to postone blog entry a week from one of our church members, an audio file for the previous Sunday's sermon, and an audio file from one of the sermons in our archive (eventually the sermon feed will be available via iTunes through apple's store interface). Our pastor has just started a new series (we'll be going through 1 and 2 Peter), so now is a good time to join in if you are looking for something new to listen to.

It's been a pretty big chunk of work, and it will continue to take some work as I'll need to prod people to write blogs and edit two sermons every week. I'll also need to do ongoing maintenance and find time to implement some additional features that I'd like to put in place. Still, I'm pretty pleased.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, the background textures and the dove image are taken from the walls of our sanctuary. I got out the digital camera, took some pictures, did some tweaking, and here we are!