The project involved replacing a rather static ‘old school’ site for Big Picture Triathlon Coaching. Initial discussion took place and then a concept was agreed upon. The concept was then turned into a theme and the theme was populated. I also did training on the site so that Big Picture now have the ability to control the site completely.

It’s another WordPress powered site but the blog side of it is really restricted to some training advice at the moment. Thanks must go to the lovely michelledancer for some wonderful WordPress coding work – things have been really busy so I’ve actually had to outsource some work! If all outsourcing goes as well as this project then I hope I get the chance to do it lots more!

And this brings me on to another self employed web worker lesson – it’s ok to say you don’t have time! I have a lot in the air at the moment with some exciting projects on the go and a lot more on the horizon. So when it got to the crunch I realised I just didn’t have time to do all that I had said I would. Obviously it means that profit margins etc aren’t as great but to be honest as long as I pay the bills I don’t really mind about that.

Jon Cooper is a writer from Sheffield.

He asked for a blog to put his scribblings on.  Not literal scribbling.  Computer scribbling. So Hoyland Web Services set him up a WordPress Blog using some nice textures we found and a few icons from various places.

The theme has widgets for the sidebars and validates to xhtml transitional.  The site is hosted by hoyland and I like it.

You can view the site at www.joncooper.info.

Many thanks go to the artistic genius of Jonny Evans who supplied the artwork.

Ali Johnson is a Christian speaker and evangelist type guy who asked for somewhere to put his writings and his thoughts.  It’s a basic two column blog with a fully widget driven sidebar and a few nifty plugins.

The site is valid XHTML Strict and CSS 2.1 and uses the Fontburner Plugin to create the headers in the main posts and the sidebars and Twitter for WordPress for the Twitter Feed.  A quick note on the Twitter Feed – at the moment it’s being taken from the Natwivity which is a special advent Twitter account telling the Nativity story using Twitter technology – the Christmas story in 140 characters.  If you’re on Twitter you should follow along – it starts today!

Things have been pretty busy here at Hoyland Web Services over the last few weeks which is great news and I’m looking forward to announcing, among other things, an author’s blog, a couple of slice and dice jobs, an update to a local company and a potentially big project that I shall call “Jam Sandwich“.

But today has been frustrating because today I have spent a lot of time looking at the message “Error establishing database connection.”  Now, before you all run away from me screaming “He wants my business and he can’t even INSTALL WordPress” I must tell you I know how to install WordPress.  It’s pretty simple.  I reckon anyone could do it.  However, something just will not work.  I don’t know if it’s the hosting company (not Godsweb!) that is the problem or what but no matter what details I put into the wp-config file I can not get communication with the database going.  It’s made harder today by the fact that the work I’m doing is for a client who is talking to the hosting company.  The hosting company seem to be giving the client the run around and I can’t do anything about it.  So herein lies Self Employed Web Worker Lesson 2 (I’ve learnt far more than that but I haven’t blogged it!)

“It’s not always as simple as the instruction book suggests”

I’m off to establish a connection.  I’ll let you know about the projects I mentioned soon.  Oh yeah – before I go – WordPress 2.8.5 has been out for a few days now – if you run WordPress just click the Upgrade Now link in your dashboard.  It’s only a hardening update – getting ready for 2.9!

In WordPress 2.9, there will be the ability to add an image to a post, as it’s been known of magazine themes. The image need not be insert into the post. With the new feature the_post_image() you can use the new feature and thus control where to display.

You can read the rest of the article on wpengineer.com.

It’s a very useful idea as it’s the kind of thing I keep putting into themes I make but I have to use various custom fields and other bits of code. I’m looking forward to it.

Basically it allows you to upload video and audio files through the WordPress Media area and then assign the files to playlists that you can set up yourself.  The playlists are called really easily into any post or page you choose by placing [ playlist id=ID ] wherever you want the player to feature.  You can have many different playlists and there are a lot of different options for the player.  The great thing about it is that it ties in to the WordPress media section so pretty much if you can upload a picture to WordPress then you’ll be able to use the plugin.  My only concern with it at the moment is that it isn’t actually linked to the gallery itself so there is no option to add the video / audio through the upload option through the post editor.  I am sure it would be a hassle but it would be great if that could work.  It may be something that would tie in better with WordPress 2.9′s easier media handling that I mentioned yesterday.

Alex Rabe is the guy who created the fantastic nextgen gallery which can be seen on about a million WordPress websites and so the development of wordTube is probably in safe hands!  The plugin can be downloaded from WordPress Extend.

Annoying but not too terrible.

It does, however, make me more glad that I don’t use the default admin account within WordPress.  One of the first things I do when I set up a new WordPress site is to create another administrator and then demote the default admin down to a subscriber.  This leaves the default admin in the WP database but removes any of their rights.

I’ve never had any security issues with WordPress sites except once the St John’s site was hacked by Iskorpitx although as far as I can tell that was to do with a weakness with cPanel rather than WordPress but it is better to be safe than sorry.  There are a few plugins around that make your install more secure – you can find most of them through the WordPress plugins directory but the main one is “Secure WordPress” which offers quite a few little changes (such as removing the error message from the login page, removing information about the version of WP you are using etc) and they all add up to make a secure install of WP.

The best way to keep your WordPress install safe is by staying up to date with the releases.  Which makes the automatic update feature really useful.  And while I’m talking about updating WordPress – it doesn’t sound as if version 2.9 is too far away.  The biggest development seems to be aimed at the multi media side of things and Rudolf Lai has been working on implementing photo albums within WordPress as part of Google’s Summer of Code which is almost over.  There are other media features being looked at such as basic image editing and an update to the way media is embedded within WP.  Another change due is the switch to MySQL 4.1.2 instead of 4.0 which is around five years old now!

I’m already looking forward to it.  I also read that Version 3.0 (also due sometime 2010 – WordPress adopted a regular 3 – 4 month release schedule) may be merging WordPress and WordPress MU into a single product.  Although the information only comes in a comment and I’ve not heard any more about that yet.

I just wanted to pull together some of the sites and tools I have found useful in turning a blogging platform into a simple yet very effective content management system that makes it realistic for a church with pretty much any budget to have an easily updateable, fantastic looking website that can be used to communicate with church members, newcomers, people looking for a church or even as an outreach opportunity.

The first couple of places to point out are Living Open Source and Church Communications Pro.  Two very fine websites offering loads of tips, not only for using WordPress, but for church communication in general.  In particular the Living OS site’s series from way back in 2007 “Blogging your church with WordPress” has been very informative.  Church Communications Pro produced an equally useful series on WordPress For Church Websites.

Noupe.com has published a comprehensive guide for using WordPress as a CMS and while not being aimed at churches all of the information within the guide is useful for anyone wanting to use WP.  It also includes some really nice examples of sites built with WP.

One important thing to consider when creating any website is the design of the site.  Time for a bit of a shameless plug but  Hoyland Web Services would be more than happy to create you a design and we’re able to work with pretty much any brief from “We don’t have a clue” to “Here’s what we want it to look like” but there are loads of ready made themes out there for use with WordPress that, with a little bit of customisation, can make your site look pretty spectacular.  Take a look, for example, at Studiopress.  I have been a fan of Brian Gardner ever since I used his Christmas Theme on my blog a few years back and his work, whatever name it is given, is always spot on.  All his themes are available for free or as paid themes that come with support.  I am an affiliate of Studiopress (although probably their worst one!) so drop me a line if you’re interested in buying any of his themes.  Tim (from Living Open Source) has also created some very fine free themes that are specifically aimed at church use.

The final thing I’m going to mention here are plugins.  These are usually free bits of code that ‘plug in’ to the WordPress setup and increase the functionality of the site using them.  I personally think plugins are great but some people don’t like them.  A few of the plugins I would use on any WordPress driven website are:

1. Podpress – although support has been questionable over recent months I would recommend Podpress to anyone wanting to use their church site for sharing any audio.
2. Akismet – comes built in with WordPress but you have to register with WordPress.com for it to work.  It’s free though and stops spam comments appearing on your site.
3. Featured Content Gallery – a great plugin that enables you to have a dynamic slideshow of posts on your site. Really useful for making the front page look more interesting!
4. Reftagger – another great plugin that transforms any bible reference on your site so that when the user hovers over the reference they see the verse.  Fully customisable with lots of versions of the bible available.
5. Contact Form – possibly not the most expansive contact form available but very reliable and easy to use.
6. Subsrcibe2 – an easy to use subscription system allowing people to easily sign up to get updates from your site to their inbox.
7. All In One SEO – good if you want to improve search rankings and keep a nice clean website.
8. Google Sitemaps – again – good for rankings and keeping Google happy.

Ok – I’m going to stop at 8 but I could go on!

There is so much more I could say about WordPress for Church use but I am sure you’ll stop reading way before now.  Needless to say Hoyland Web Services would be delighted to help you in any way if you are looking at creating or changing a church website.  We don’t HAVE to work with WordPress but we enjoy it lots when we do!  Get in touch if you would like to know more.  If you mention this post when talking to us I’m pretty sure we can wangle some kind of discount too.  Or maybe throw in free hosting for a year…