web development

Lisa Hendey

This presentation was given at the 2011 Catholic New Media Conference. Below are my notes on the presentation:

Why Bother?

• Educate about the Church
• Provide parish information
• Outreach to interest groups
• Build community

10 Best Practices for Parish Websites

From Craig Berry:

1. Useful contact us page
2. About Us/History Page
3. Prominent use of Social Media
4. Online Map/Directions
5. Calendar of Events
6. Weekly Bulletins
   
7. Blog
8. Site Map
9. Mass Times
10. Donate Online

What Parishioners Want (from online polling)

1. Priestly presence (this can be easy or hard)
2. Ministry schedule information
3. Homilies available online
4. Q&A with Pastor
5. Photos, photos, photos!
6. Religious education resources
7. Opt-in text reminders
8. Bulletin online early
9. Mobile version
10. Online forms and registration
11. Active Facebook presence for wired parishioners and teens
12. Online stewardship
13. Ride sharing resources

Outreach

• We are at the service of the Word.
• Never neglect human relationships.

Is social media right for your parish?

From Jared Dees, Today's Parish

• What are my parish's goals?
• Does the parish website align with these goals?
• Do I have the time and people to participate in social media?
• Will I be able to relinquish control of the conversation?
• Are you ready?

Building Community

• Involve many and non-traditional volunteers
• Offer cultural and linguistic diversity
• Include photos (within existing usage policies)
• Meet them where they are
• Establish a parish hastag
• Activate youth and young adult resources and don't forget "wired" seniors
• Hang Out (on Google+)
• Find a Knight in shining armor
• Check in at church

Dealing with Resistance

• What are some of the best practices for overcoming resistance in social media efforts in the parish?
  • Parish leaders are often unable to see the online component of the parish as more than a 'publishing medium'
  • Assure leaders that you can put limits and boundaries on things so it doesn't grow out of control or too expensive
  • You can still have active and beautiful online presences without vast resources
  • Start small, and incrementally grow. Sometimes you just need to take a small step, and then wait.

Hall of Fame

• ourladyofhope.net
• Nativity Catholic Church
• St. Mary's Catholic Center
• Introduction to New Translation of the Roman Missal
• eCatholic
• St. Clement Catholic Church
• St. John the Baptist in MA (couldn't find link)
• Lisa M. Hendey

After staring at a todo in my inbox for a few weeks, I finally got around to doing it on the flight back from Boston yesterday. I simply wanted an easy, quick, at-a-glance way of telling what time it was in different timezones/cities around the US (and eventually around the world).

So, I created Alltheti.me:

(as displayed on the iPad)

I've been wanting something like this for quite some time, and I finally got a few hours to play around with dates and times in PHP and JavaScript. The times may not be quite right when viewed in certain timezones, so I'd appreciate if any friends from outside US Central time could tell me if their own times are correct.

I plan on adding a few small features and visual tweaks soon (right now it's pretty boring), but I really want to maintain the site's speed and simplicity. The reason I don't use any other sites for this purpose is because they're way too complex, offer way too many features, and are usually overridden by tons of ads.

Any other suggestions to make it more useful? 

Thanks to iOS5's support for contentEditable text areas, rich text editors like TinyMCE and CKEditor (two of my favorites, which I install on many Drupal sites using the WYSIWYG module) now work great for editing content on the web in mobile Safari!

This means that I'll be more likely to do site content work on the road with my iPad 2. I just wish they supported file select fields so I could also add images more easily on the go.

Check out all the details over on Midwestern Mac: WYSIWYG Editing (contentEditable support) in iOS 5.

Lest I forget to mention it, flockNote's 'version 3' website has been launched as of Wednesday afternoon! I spent many (if not most) of my waking hours working on the website and hundreds of features contained within, and after a couple days up and running, the website's still going like a champ!

Excellent home page design by Matthew Warner.

The site is built entirely on top of Drupal 7, and over the past three months, I've grown to appreciate Drupal many times more, as I've learned so much more about the deep and thorough APIs—bugs and all—that have developed into an extremely solid, reliable, and capable framework that is Drupal 7.x. Heck, I even dream about Drupal these days!

Expect more writing about the new features and platform that is flockNote v3 in the coming days—the ride's not over yet, though my 10+ hour workdays are, for a time!

How do you know you've been thinking about work too much? When your wife relates a conversation she had with you in the morning, and you don't remember a word, but can definitely see how what you said relates to what you're working on:

Saith my wife: "Jeff, how do you set your alarm?"

My (groggy) reply: "Hit field, the arrow, then default."

Now, this could possibly have something to do with alarm clocks. There are often arrows on them, and you hit buttons... but I know better. I was referring to:

$this->addFieldMapping('field', 'source')->defaultValue(0);

...which I have probably typed about 100 times in the past week, and maybe 20 or so last night during a late-night debugging session with the Migration process of flockNote v2 to v3 (from a proprietary WAMP-based system to a new Drupal 7 LAMP-based system).

It's sad, I know, but I hope you'll like what myself, Matt, Barrett, and the rest of the flockNote team have come up with over the past few months. It's been a marathon, but expect some great news about flockNote very soon!