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Archdiocese of Saint Louis' Upgraded Website

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

New Online Community Site

Submitted by catholicservant on Wed, 09/30/2009 - 4:43pm
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 Howdy folks,

I've just released a new website into beta:

http://community.thecatholicspirit.com

It's definitely a 'work-in-progress', but we're just getting started trying to build an online community. We're also putting in content that's a bit more relevant to 'younger' Catholics.

If you get a chance, drop on by and register, it's free! 

The Tech Details:

  • Based on Joomla 1.5.14
  • Utilizing the JomSocial component for community
  • Using the MyBlog and JomComment extensions for blogging and commenting
  • Kunena forum component
  • Affinity Rockettheme Template
  • Some other 3rd party extensions (EventList, QuickFAQ, GK NewsPro and few more)

On a side note, I did try using the new-ish K2 extension for CCK-style content, but didn't work out the way I wanted. Kinda boiled down to integration issues with the other components. It was a good exercise though, and I'll be implementing K2 in another project that should fit better.

UPDATE 11/27/09

Just spent the past 2 days revamping the site. 

  • Loaded a new template from Joomlashack.
  • Went 'RED'.
  • Dropped the Azrul MyBlog and JomComment components and went with a WordPress for Joomla component from CorePHP and incorporated the Disqus commenting tool for articles.
  • Removed some of the features that weren't being used such as EventList and QuickFAQ. I might bring them back at a later date though.

Looking for Drupal / Joomla / CMS Developers

Submitted by oscatholic on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 1:53pm
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I have been contacted recently by a few different Catholic organizations asking for help with various web projects. They (obviously) want to stay within a budget, but are at a loss as to finding a developer who will (a) keep their mission in mind, (b) develop a really slick website and (c) not charge two arms and a leg.

Please continue to post your information in the Services forum, whether you're looking for (or are available for) work, or you have a job that needs completion. I would love to put someone in contact with an organization or two, and I think that this website is a good means for that!

There's plenty of work available, but I think a lot of times, the problem is simply a lack of channels of communication!

Caching a Page; Saving a Server

Submitted by geerlingguy on Fri, 07/24/2009 - 3:43pm
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A couple months ago, the Archdiocese of Saint Louis announced that a new Archbishop had been chosen (then-Archbishop-elect Robert J. Carlson). For the announcement, the Archdiocese streamed the press conference online, then posted pictures on the St. Louis Review website of the day's events (updated every hour or two).

Pageviews on April 21, 2009 - Archstl.org
Pageviews for April 21, 2009 on archstl.org – note that from 8-10 a.m., the server was practically down from the thousands of hits/requests it was getting. Just before 10 a.m., I enabled the caching described below. We announced everything via Twitter, SMS, Press Releases, and the web, just after 5 a.m.

During this period of time, the Archdiocesan website had over 2,000 visitors per hour, and almost all the visitors were hitting the home page. The website (run on Joomla 1.0.x) didn't have many caching mechanisms in place, and for almost a complete hour, the website was returning server errors as the processor was pegged at 100% utilization. Something had to be done! Continue Reading »

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