Pantano Christian Church

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)

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. 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!