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Drupal Gardens Beta - A Giant Leap in Community Building...

Submitted by oscatholic on Tue, 03/02/2010 - 7:38pm
in

Creating your Catholic site - Drupal Gardens beta

I was just invited to the Drupal Gardens private beta today, and I have to say, it's a leap forward in terms of building out quick, beautiful, and well-designed websites. But it takes things many, many, many steps further than a simple Wordpress or Blogger site.

Drupal Gardens is built with Drupal at its core, and every site instance you set up is basically an entire Drupal website (and it's completely exportable, so if your needs grow beyond the Drupal Gardens garden, you can re-plant on another server). This means you can have multiple users (with multiple permission levels). You can do relatively advanced theming, right out of the box (and without knowing too much about HTML, CSS, etc.!). You can set up multiple content types and set up specialized databases and queries. There are a thousand and one things you can do with DG much more quickly than by-hand.

Catholic Prayer Resource site - Drupal Gardens beta
From nothing to full site, in about 2 minutes.

There isn't a whole lot missing from Drupal Gardens. I think it will transform the way I approach smaller website design jobs - instead of working locally and starting from scratch, I might as well build out a Gardens site (collaborating with my clients, or whomever I'm working with), then let the client take over and run with it.

Once Drupal Gardens is out of beta, expect to hear a lot more. I think this system could help a lot of parishes in a lot of ways—not the least of which is financially!

Archdiocese of Saint Louis' Upgraded Website

Submitted by oscatholic on Mon, 02/22/2010 - 7:00am
in

In early 2009, it was determined that the Archdiocese of Saint Louis needed to upgrade its website, mostly for security concerns. After investigating a move from Joomla 1.0.x to Joomla 1.5.x, the Archdiocese determined it would be more cost effective and a more future proof decision to migrate the over 49 individual Joomla sites that comprised www.archstl.org into a single Drupal installation.

Archdiocese of Saint Louis Website Upgrades

This upgrade/migration provides many benefits, not the least of which are a better end-user experience, a better administrative experience, and much improved page load and search indexing performance. In addition, Drupal's structure and content presentation provide much greater flexibility in design and information structure, as well as SEO (search engine optimization) than other popular CMS frameworks that were investigated.

The decision was made early on to partner with a development company that would help with the content migration and initial site buildout. Theming would be done in-house. We chose to partner with Palantir.net, a web development company located in Chicago, IL. After Palantir completed initial site work, I went up to meet them, and also attended my first DrupalCamp (Chicago); Chicago has a much more vibrant Drupal community than St. Louis... but perhaps that will change at some point!

After nearly a year's worth of planning and development, the Archdiocese launched its upgraded website on February 22, 2010. Continue Reading »

PrayerCenter (using Drupal)

Submitted by oscatholic on Mon, 02/22/2010 - 7:00am
in

The Archdiocese of Saint Louis' website has always had a very widely-used and useful prayer request functionality. Anyone in the world can submit a prayer request, and every prayer request is moderated and prayed for by contemplative sisters in the Archdiocese.

Old Prayer Center Form
The old prayer request form

The website first had an online contact form, and all prayer requests were submitted by email. However, after some time, this got to be quite a burden (hundreds of requests were coming in every day!). The Archdiocese used a Joomla! component, PrayerCenter, to handle the prayer requests for some time, with some custom modifications to speed up the workflow of moderating hundreds (some days, many hundreds!) of prayer requests. PrayerCenter is pretty good, but is not as modular and able to be customized as I would like.

Create Prayer Request Form
The new prayer request form

The new prayer request form (visible to end users) is highly optimized, and much more user-friendly. It limits the amount of characters in a prayer request, and using jQuery, shows the user how many characters he has remaining. Going completely custom allowed us to also tweak every last detail to our liking, meaning we didn't have confusing PrayerCenter branding here and there. Continue Reading »

Drupal ImageCache - Display Alt Text as Caption

Submitted by oscatholic on Sat, 02/20/2010 - 3:43pm
in

While building the Archdiocese of Saint Louis' website (launching Feb. 22, 2010), I needed an easy and quick way to allow users to caption images, without much hassle. On the old Joomla version of the website, users would have to upload an image, then insert it, then click on it, then click another button to add an image caption, set border properties, add padding, etc.

To cut through most of that mess, I set up an ImageField with Drupal's Insert module, which helps save a few clicks (and eliminates any need for users to navigate through directories and manage yet another set of files on the server itself—this approach is not altogether bad, but can be harder to teach to many people). But how to do image captions?

Easy! Just create an ImageCache preset that can be used by the Insert module when an image is inserted, and use a theme function (inside your Drupal theme's template.php file) to grab the Alternate text and convert it to a caption.

<?php
/**
* Add a caption to imagefield pictures with an 'alt' tag
*/
function archstl_imagecache($namespace, $path, $alt = '', $title = '', $attributes = NULL) {
  if ($path) {
        $attributes = drupal_attributes($attributes);
      $imagecache_path = file_create_url(file_directory_path() .'/imagecache/'. $namespace .'/'. $path);
      $output = '<img src="http://www.opensourcecatholic.com/'. $imagecache_path .'" alt="'. check_plain($alt) .'" title="'. check_plain($title) .'" '. $attributes .' />';
      $output .= '<div class="caption">'. check_plain($alt) .'</div>';
      return $output;
    }
}
?>

One downside to this approach is the fact that users won't be able to see the caption while they're editing the page... but I might figure out something to fix that, perhaps with a JavaScript plugin for the TinyMCE editor (we use the WYSIWYG module to set up editor profiles on the new site).

[UPDATE: This is not quite working for me right now... works great for imagecache-built CCK ImageFields, but not with inserted images... might have to resort to a JavaScript-only solution for the time being.]

The new Archdiocesan website will launch on Monday, February 22... stay tuned!

Embed Google Wave

Submitted by mdhoerr on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 3:44pm
in

Some Info

Wave API: http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/embed.js

Wave URL: https://wave.google.com/wave/

Wave ID: googlewave.com!w+Wt7Fj-_RC

Drupal Views Filters: Making Exposed Searches User-Friendly

Submitted by archstl on Wed, 02/03/2010 - 4:48pm
in

One of the main new features of the Archdiocese of Saint Louis' website (to launch on February 22!) is the much-improved parish and school searching capabilities. There are many facets to these sections of the site; everything is built using the combination of nodes built with CCK, Views, and Mapstraction (for Google Map interfaces).

Parish Search by Name

One of the main annoyances with most implementations of parish and school searching that I've found (and I've tested almost every U.S. Archdiocese's website for this functionality) is the fact that searches are extremely rigid - if you don't type in the exact terms for the title of the parish in the parish database, you won't get any results.

For instance, type in "St. Luke," and you might get a result for St. Luke parish. However, type in "Saint Luke," and you get nothing. Or, what if you type in "Saints Joachim and Anne," but the parish is in the database as "Sts. Joachim & Anne"? Continue Reading »

Hits vs. Visits - Optimize Your Website!

Submitted by oscatholic on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 11:46am
in

Recently, I've been tracking visits on two of the larger Archdiocesan websites on our Archdiocesan web server, and I found an interesting anomaly (one that I had thought was odd earlier, but didn't really have hard numbers to decipher it until more recently). Check out the hits (a 'hit' is a file downloaded from the web server to a computer) for the entire www.archstl.org domain:

Hits for Archstl.org and StLouisReview.com:
Hits Counter - Urchin 6

173,000 hits on archstl.org vs. 44,000 hits on the St. Louis Review website.

Sounds reasonable, right? After all, the Archdiocesan website incorporates over 49 different 'subsites' - for education, cemeteries, the missions, the Catholic Youth Apostolate, etc. There are about 4 hits on archstl.org to every hit on the Review site.

So, you would expect that the number of visitors would be proportionate, no?

Visitors for Archstl.org and StLouisReview.com:
Visits Counter - Urchin 6

Woah! Wait a second... the Archdiocesan site had four times the number of hits—how does it have only 75% of the visitors of the Review site?

The problem here is a highly unoptimized site structure and file system, which, in high-traffic conditions, could (and, in fact, did, a couple times) bring a web server to its knees.

Right now, on www.archstl.org, each of the 49 subsites has its own template folder, with its own images and template files. This means that if you go to www.archstl.org, then click on a link to www.archstl.org/education, you're basically going to an entirely different website (in terms of file structure, and you have to re-download the entire template, and all the files...

Nevermind simply following YSlow's suggestions and optimizing file etags/gzip! If the same file is accessed at /templates/archstl/image.png and /education/templates/archstl/image.png, it has to be downloaded twice.

We're working on remedying this situation, but it's a good idea to keep tabs on these kinds of stats, just to make sure you know where potential site performance problems lie.

If two or three of the sites on www.archstl.org had a large volume of visitors in a matter of minutes, the server would go down in flames. Luckily, this has only happened once (and we responded pretty quickly), but in my mind, our infrastructure, site design, and filesystem should take performance into account.

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