Pantano Christian Church

The Pantano Web Team has been working hard to make things easier for users and editors here on pccwired.org. Some features that were slated for 2.0 weren’t quite ready for primetime, but we’ve slowly been releasing them over the last few weeks.

Here are the new features, dubbed the “2.1″ release:

• Community Forums - the Pantano community now has a forum home! You can share prayer requests, (respectfully) debate theology and more. There is also a dedicated spot for submitting feature requests and feedback on the website.
• Custom banners - each ministry / content area can now have a custom header to make things more personal.
• Missions Blog - a new content area, this blog is for keeping track of our foreign missionaries. We recently saw both Ghana, Africa teams post day-by-day summaries of the mission field.
• Flash Video Player - The JW FLV Media Player has had some great feature additions upstream, so we upgraded the plugin copy on pccwired.org, which is now available to all content areas and blogs. New features include: multiple video formats (inc. .mp4), YouTube support and a sidebar media browser.

Coming up, we’re looking at how to integrate many features from our church management software, including browsing and connecting to Life Groups, registering new Life Groups, and a great new event registration piece. We’re also looking at upgrading our main content software, WordPress, to version 2.5 which sports a great new editor interface.

We have some major site updates and new features planned for release over the next few months. The Pantano Web Team is working on making the site user-friendly and much easier to navigate for visitors. Here’s what may be in store:

• Switch to drop-down menus - our menu options are necessarily increasing so we need to make room aesthetically for those additional options. We’re working on a JavaScript menu to accomplish this task. The drop-down menus will replace the current side menu.
• Theme refresh - while red, yellow and offwhite may have seemed pleasant to look at when we built our first WordPress theme, it’s time to start fresh. The designers are working on consistency in color, branding and style to match other Pantano publications (Handbook, etc).
• Story submission - Stories Along the Path is a great way for stories to be published and heard. We’re working on an easy, no-hassle method for submitting your own stories to be included in that list.
• Media Library - the weekend podcast has been a huge success; there are several subscribers to the feed, and even more people browse to the Weekend Messages section to listen or download recent messages. We’re going to expand this functionality to include more than just Weekend Messages and more than just audio. Podcasts from classes, the 222 Bible Study, videos we play on the weekend, published print material as PDFs, etc.
• Forums - a Pantano webforum has been in the works for some time, but we’ve been delayed with a few technical and social implications. The forums will be made publicly available soon.
• Life Group listings, registrations, event calendars, etc. - The Pathway Team is considering some new software to manage our database, and it will provide us with many dynamic tools on the website that we haven’t been able to incorporate yet.

Be on the lookout for these changes! As always, your feedback is extremely welcome.

Some people have reported that they are not able to post a comment here and are getting an error stating something like:

“WP-Hashcash Check Failed”

A work around that has helped some is to hit the “back” button on your browser and try to “Submit Comment” again. Also, make sure that JavaScript is enabled in your web browser. If you continue to have problems please notify the PCC web team or you can email us your comment and we will try to post it for you - send questions to webmaster@pccwired.org

Hey Pantano people! We are looking for anyone who keeps a blog, Flickr stream, podcast or videoblog (and I suppose that plain old personal websites are okay, too). Here’s the plan: we want to create a special section on pccwired.org that connects Pantano Bloggers. I’ve done some searching on Google and Technorati, and I found at least a few blogs that regularly link back to Pantano. A Pantano Blogger Community will hopefully be a good way for us folks on the Intertubes to meet and digitally socialize. It is also a step (pun intended) toward some of the social networking features planned for eventual release on pccwired.org.

FOR BLOGGERS: If you are a regular attender or consider yourself a member of Pantano Christian Church, leave a comment here with a link to your blog/podcast/Flickr/etc.

FOR NON-BLOGGERS: If you have no idea what a blog is, you’ll have to start with the Wikipedia explanation. If you want to start blogging for yourself, go start an account at www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com and then post back here once it is ready.

Pantano Elders have approved updated language to our belief statement. See the updated Belief and Commitment page in the Visitors section of the website.

Great news! We’ve decided it would be prudent and helpful to the global Church community to release our modified version of WordPressMU (multi-user). From the WordPressMU website description:

Ever dream of running hundreds of thousands of blogs with a single install of WordPress?

WordPress MU, or multi-user, is designed to do exactly that. It is most famously used for WordPress.com where it serves tens of millions of hits on hundreds of thousands of blogs each day.

It makes a great church website content-management-system (CMS), but there are some important changes needed in the PHP source. We’ve made those changes and continue to do so. It is an informal process, but we will try to post updates regularly.

I don’t have a changelog because I didn’t keep one, but here is a list of some of the changes:

• Backend Dashboard shows a list of links to all blog Dashboards instead of the WordPress development blog
• “Blogroll” menu option is “Links” which is friendlier verbage for users
• “Plugins” menu option is added back in
• Plugin and theme editing is enabled for administrators
• Several WordPress and MU plugins are preinstalled (but must be activated per-blog)
• TinyMCE Editor has many more buttons and options enable
• Zip files can be served from posts (added especially for this post!)

Download WordPressMU, Pantano Edition

(version 20070125, based on WordPressMU 1.0)

I heard some people having problems with the flash player, so I wanted to provide two essential flash related links…
» Check your version of flash player
It is important to know what version you have installed (you must have version 9 at the very least)
» Download the most recent version
I am just echoing Bill’s first update about this. It’s really simple to download and use.

The new PCC website was launched one week ago. There were many trails to blaze leading up to the site launch, but our first week has been really great.

In the first week, we had:

62,835 total hits
27,894 page views
2,364 visitors
1,200 unique visitors
and roughly 420 feed/email subscribers

In addition to so many visitors, we also had a few bugs. After several user comments and emails (those are great, keep them coming!), we discovered that the “Previous Entries” link on the bottom of blog and archive pages didn’t work. Since those links are dynamically generated, I had to sift through some WordPress code to figure out where the real problem was. In the end, it was a single line that needed to be removed. The Events page went through a major face lift so that it would show event dates, rather than post dates. That required the use of a WordPress plugin called RS Event (which I had to modify a bit).

The Weekend Messages blog, and its ever-important podcast, saw a few design changes to accommodate for messages that aren’t in a series. Also, both the series and titles are now displayed in iTunes. On the Pantano E-News blog, a bug in the comment form was giving us some grief, so we ended up disabling the spam-filter plugin. As a result, all comments on the E-News blog must be approved by an administrator or the post author.

You can see a list of major upcoming features we plan to launch in the next few months. There are also a few minor updates, including uploading some past messages and their podcasts, getting videos to work in feeds and emails, and publishing a new Welcome/What to Expect video that doesn’t make your eyeballs swirl. :)

As always, you can leave feedback here or on the Website Team Sandbox, or you can send an email to webmaster@pantanochristian.org. This website exists for both the Pantano family and guests, so you can “help us help you” by asking questions and letting us know what you would like to see!

The FEED button that can be seen on several sections of the Pantano website has a useful purpose. Each FEED button links to the syndication feed (also known as an RSS feed) of that blog. For example, on the Pantano E-News blog, the FEED button directs you to the Pantano E-News syndication feed.

• What is a syndication feed?
  A feed is a special web format that we use to easily distribute content on our website. You can subscribe to feeds using a “feed reader.” Feeds are very similar to podcasts. In fact, a podcast is really just a feed with audio attached. When you subscribe to a feed, it will be updated in your feed reader as we add content. For example, when Pastor Glen Elliott posts his weekly E-News, it will arrive in your feed reader. Feeds are NOT email, and a feed reader is not an email inbox, but there are some similarities. In the case of E-News, you have access to the feed through a special email subscription service. However, normal feeds will not have this email subscription available.
• So… what? What’s the big idea about syndication feeds?
  Simplicity. Instead of checking Pantano’s website for updates every day, the updates are delivered to you. You can subscribe to an unlimited number of feeds from our website and any other site on the web. Each morning, when I open my feed reader, I read content from Pantano, friends’ and colleagues’ blogs, CNN, Slashdot News, Google Blog, and much more. And I never actually visit those websites (unless I want to leave a comment).
• What are some good feed readers?
  There are several online feed readers. They all require that you sign up (so you can store your list of feeds), but registration will always be free.
  • Google Reader (recommended)
  • Bloglines
  • NewsGator

The PCC website utilizes blogs to present information in a discussion format. We hope to foster online discussions of the content on our site. On pages that utilize blogs like Pantano E-news and Stories along the Path and our Weekend Messages you can post comments. At the bottom of each post you will see a link that says “No Comments” or “1 Comment” to indicate there is 1 comment. Click on this link to read the existing comments or to create a comment of your own. Your comment will be posted onto the site and emailed to the author.