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.

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.

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!