archstl

One of the last major projects I was privileged to work on (along with some other awesome colleagues) while I was working as the Director of Web Development for the Archdiocese of St. Louis (see 'A New Job' on my blog for more info) was the Eucharistic Congress website and video.

One of the major benefits of using a robust content management system like Drupal (which archstl.org uses) is that you can actually build 'special sites' that highlight certain events or causes without building an entirely separate website. For example: Every organization in the Archdiocese has it's own website, with its own content managers, its own forms, news pages, articles, etc. through the use of Drupal's 'Organic Groups' module.

For the 2011 Eucharist Congress, instead of building a separate website, and then linking back to the Archdiocesan website, we built a single page template for the Congress home page (using a standard Drupal template (.tpl.php) file), and then set up all the rest of the content (a registration form, some information pages, etc.) in Drupal.

The results are pretty impressive (you have to visit the site to see the jQuery-enabled page load effects, which look great on any device—no Flash here!):

In addition to this awesome website (the front end was designed by Ben G., who works in the Archdiocese's Catholic Youth Apostolate), an excellent video highlighting the Eucharist was produced, and is visible (in HD!) on YouTube:

Kudos to the team who helped with all of these promotional materials for the Eucharistic Congress! I think this raises the bar, or at least pushes it a little, for Catholic dioceses hoping to spread the word about their larger events!

There's plenty of posts about this already, which I won't repeat here, instead, read the reports below:

• Archdiocese of St. Louis has a new app - Catholic STL
• Designing and Building Catholic STL

And, straight from the horse's mouth, here's the app's page on the Archdiocesan website.

This iPhone App kind of snuck up on me from under my radar; I was in the middle of two rather large projects in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, when I thought "Hmm... I've wanted to try my hand at an iPhone App for some time. Maybe the time is right!" After a few long nights, a few condensed weekends, and some work hours here and there, I've finished work on what I hope will be an inspirational app.

Not inspirational in the sense that people feel moved to prayer, or feel closer to Christ—no, that's not really the purpose of this app. Rather, inspirational in two ways:

1. In helping people utilize the sacraments.
   The main feature of this app (indeed, it launches straight into it!) is the parish mass/confession/reconciliation time discovery interface. It's so easy to simply find Mass times (or other sacrament times) with this app, that nobody has an excuse for missing Mass if they have an iPhone and are physically able to move about.
2. In getting more (Arch)dioceses on board with new communications initiatives.
   I'm hoping that this will be a benchmark app against which other (arch)dioceses can compare their own efforts in the mobile, 'just-in-time' area. Our parishioners deserve to have the information they need to help them in their faith lives—and they need it in their pockets!

At some point (maybe sooner rather than later), I'd like to open the code, maybe stash it on Github, and help other Catholic organizations make use of it (to whatever extent possible) for their own needs.

I'd also like to have an Android app for the Archdiocese, but so far I've not had the impetus (either from myself or from others) to do so. Read more of my thoughts on Android dev (as it stands now).

Perfect, the app is not. But I'm already tagging and working on a few bugs I've found in the version on the App Store right now, and I'm working on sync so the iPhone will always have the latest parish event time information. You can follow more of that development here.

Do you have any good ideas for further development? Any further integrations you see as necessary? Let me know in the comments!

Want to see what this is all about? If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad (this version isn't optimized for iPad yet), download Catholic STL for free.

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 »

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).

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 »

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.