Christian Web Resources

I just listened to a very informative podcast packed with a lot of great insights for designing sites, Not just the visual components, but also the navigation/search and technology, and how they support the real deliverable - the content itself.I'm sharing it here, not just as a resource for us as we build our own personal sites, or sites for clients, but also as a guideline for us as we build the ImpressCMS sites and develop the core and its modules.

As we come down to the final stretch of launching ImpressCMS 1.2, I've been looking over the changelog and I've been completely blown away by 1) all the changes coming in this release, and 2) all the people that have made this possible. I just want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to making ImpressCMS a truly impressive content management system! Here is a list of names found in the changelog, just for version 1.2 -63rddavidimpressfelixgijoehisapapajmorrismarcan/...

The PHP development team has announced the final release version of 5.3.0, which includes a number of bug fixes and improvements to the 5.x series. As web hosts upgrade their platforms, this will impact the performance of content managment systems, such as ImpressCMS.ImpressCMS has already announced their move to PHP 5 compatibility and makes it a requirement.You can, see the highlights of the changes,or read the complete changelog of PHP 5.3.0. Some of the key things in 5.3.0 areThe safe_m...

After listening to one of my recent podcast subscriptions, I started thinking about the home page layout in ImpressCMS and wondering how I could improve the home page on my sites. Then it occurred to me - symlinks!In the past, and currently here at community.impresscms.org, we have often times used the front page as a holding place for a bunch of blocks of recently published content - recent posts, recent news, recent links, etc. To have this be on any other page, we have had to install a bla...

As I was going through the list of sites in the Site Showcase at Christian Web Resources, I discovered that about 1/3 of the sites that were powered by ImpressCMS or its parent CMS less than a year ago are no longer using either platform to power their sites.Some sites have gone offline altogether, some have gone to WordPress, still others to Joomla! and then others went to custom built sites or used a site builder from a hosting provider. Looking at the sites they now have, I don't see anyth...

Basically, I wanted a script to load for every page without having to edit every theme.html for every theme I was using and any I might want to use. Fortunately, ImpressCMS now offers a preload functionality that enables exactly this.I decided to try my hand at writing my own preload function for Christian Web Resources and I found it to be pretty straightforward, taking only a few minutes to do (less time than it took to write this post)

008 was a very busy year for ImpressCMS - not only did we go live here in January, we also released our very first release in March and had another big release in October. There have been over 7,000 code changes commited, almost 22.000 downloads, 200 bugs closed and 100 new feature requests completed andTtere have been over 27,000 posts made in the forums. Whew! That's a lot of activity! And we have been building our wiki and our addons repository.With all that activity there comes some chao...

I was working up a Thanksgiving post to share, but then I was completely disgusted by an event that happened earlier Friday and wondered - what's wrong with us?The day after Thanksgiving has earned the name 'Black Friday', stemming from either the 1929 US Stock Market crash, or the possible accounting reference to being profitable. Regardless of the origin of the name, the day after Thanksgiving is totally given over to shopping mayhem. What a contrast to the day of Thanksgiving, where the da...

Well, it's been a while since I posted anything in the blog (actually, since we decided to move to imBlogging instead of a separate Wordpress install), so I thougt I'd catch everyone up on what has been happening on my side of things since my last post.I've switched gears from focusing on the DB design of ImpressCMS and turned to working on a module to  become our new wiki - Wiwimod (at least that's my hope). Wiwimod has been one of my favorite modules since I started working with XOOPS and ...