oscatholic's blog

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.

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!

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.

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 »

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.

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.

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 »

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.

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!

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:

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:

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.

From Reuters:

VATICAN CITY - For God's sake, blog! Pope Benedict told priests on Saturday, saying they must learn to use new forms of communication to spread the gospel message.

In his message for the Roman Catholic Church's World Day of Communications, the pope, who is 82 and known not to love computers or the Internet, acknowledged priests must make the most of the "rich menu of options" offered by new technology

"Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources — images, videos, animated features, blogs, Web sites — which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis."

Hat tip: The Forum

More sources for the story:

"Pope Benedict XVI urged priests over the weekend to use as many tools as possible to communicate with people, which includes the Internet and—yes—blogging. The Pope, who has been a bit of an Internet cudmudgeon, acknowledged that "the larger digital world represents a great resource for humanity" and said priests should take advantage of the tool before they become outdated."

Ars Technica: Pope: priests should blog, tweet the gospel too

CNET News: Pope asks priests to become more web savvy

The Next Web: Pope tells Priests: Start blogging

Mashable: Pope's Message to Priests: We Must Blog

ABC News: Pope to Priests: Go Forth and Blog

Read the Pope's entire speech for the World Day of Communications.

There is no way to absolutely prevent people from using your organizational names, logos, branding, identity, and other copyrighted materials on social network sites (besides creating groups on every social network under every conceivable organization name, which is impractical).

The best way to combat infringements is to:

1. First, kindly ask the person who made the group to take it down.
2. Second, ask the social network (most of the big ones have this) to take down the group/account, or at least restrict access, by filing a copyright/infringement claim.
   Facebook: Copyright Infringement Policies
   Twitter: File a copyright or DMCA take-down notice
3. (If it comes to this) File a lawsuit against the social media site, or the individual who created the group/account. This is obviously expensive, and unless you've gone through the DMCA claim as stated above, don't expect to get far with this method.

It's a pain, but it's something we will all need to deal with more often these days...

Despite Microsoft including Internet Explorer in all its operating systems, people are installing FireFox as their default browser at an astonishing rate. I take pride in the fact that all but two of the sites I help maintain have already seen FireFox (and sometimes even Safari) overtake Explorer (all versions combined) as the most used browser.

FireFox far surpasses IE on any even remotely tech-oriented website.

The sites that still get more Explorer traffic are parish and Archdiocesan websites (which are typically visited by an older demographic, and/or people who are using office computers).

Germany, apparently, is the first country in which Explorer's long-standing crown as the most-used browser has been taken away by FireFox.

Of course, having 99% of the web use FireFox would be just as bad as 99% using Internet Explorer. I'm hoping Safari, Chrome, FireFox, and Internet Explorer all stay around awhile and help spark more innovation and speed in the browser arena.

Are you still using Internet Explorer? Why? The only thing I've used it for in the past two years is to test sites and make sure they work for the underprivileged part of the population who is forced (willingly or no) into using the sadness that is IE 6, 7 or even 8. Hopefully 9 will be an improvement... but it might be too little too late.