YWAM Information Technology - Content Management - Comments

UPDATE

crashsystems — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:25:06 +0100

I realized that my personal online nickname was probably not the best URL to use for a collaborative wiki project. Therefore, the guide I mentioned in this post has been moved to http://emailsecurityguide.wik.is/

An informal comparison between Sharepoint & Typo3

tofirius — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:07:20 +0100

Click this link for the video.

Chris Bischoff
YWAM Latvia, Communications
www.ywamlatvia.com

Previous Post about On-Line applications ...

bill.hutchison — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:54:17 +0100

G'day Nathan,

Thanks for the post. We have actually looked at this a few times here, and it seems like lots of people, including us, often have things in the works to build an on-line application form.

Here are two previous articles that have been written about on-line application forms:

In the end the person developing our on-line application form left, so now we are moving to a paid solution, but I do not know which one it is at the moment. Someone else is handling all our web stuff at the moment because I am currently the only IT person on base, and I am only part time because of my wife's health.

One that has interested me has been Lime Survey. The development path for the next version looks very good, but I have not looked too much into the secure aspect of it. There is no payment gateway available for it, but if you are out of the USA there really isn't that much available anyway for payment gateways.

Bill Hutchison

Ning Huge for Porn ... But so is the Internet

bill.hutchison — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:50:10 +0100

It turns out that Ning is actually pretty huge for Porn Networks. The porn networks are hidden being secure logins, but none the less, porn sites account for a large percentage of Ning's traffic.

I got this message through our Ning site:

Just want to put out the warning about associating your group with Ning.com. It is known to be a domain that supports lots of adult content. (They deny outright support, and claim pro-freedom for adult pornographic photos/videos.) This is exactly the kind of attitude we need to fight. There is such a thing as right & wrong in this world.

I understand that Christian groups need to use great technology, but don't sell out please to these immoral folks.

Ning porn networks
http://valleywag.com/340933/is-marc-andreessen-running-a-porn-ring

Recent stats still point to this being true:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/ning.com
(See bottom of page listing and click on More ning.com domains for the most popular subdomains on ning.com)

Unfortunately one of the other site administrators deleted the user that sent us that message, so I don't even know who the person was who sent us the message, otherwise I could find out more about who they were. I have actually just had my admin privileges removed this morning while I have been at home with my daughter, so I can't follow up on it myself.

When evaluating new technology and how we use it we need to take these sort of things into account, but at the same time we shouldn't run from it because some are using it for wrong. I reckon that if we always had this mentality then Christians would avoid movies, television, radio, books, magazines, and of course, worst of all, the Internet.

In the end it will be up to your own discretions, but you will need to evaluate the platform for what it is and decide if it's something you want to use, like all new technology.

Bill Hutchison

In House System

dan.snell — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:04:55 +0100

Though not yet ready to distribute we are soon testing a system we had built which gives the possibility to fill in online but allows the user to log back in at any time to finish the application process.

Daniel Snell
YWAM Harpenden Communications

Have a look at Thriva

uliverse — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:30:59 +0100

Thriva (http://thriva.com) is a paid service, but they provide a lot. We used it for different YWAM gatherings and it works great. They also do credit card processing.

Javascript on Ning Pages

bill.hutchison — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:41:17 +0100

We are having some problems with pages, notes and the HTML boxes on the site stripping out javasript and "cleaning up" the html code that we add.

It is very strict with regular users (I think it strips all javascript), and it also strips out some javascript for administrators, although we have not been able to figure out how it chooses what javascript to strip, and what javascript to leave in.

Ning Stability and Uptime

bill.hutchison — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:40:09 +0100

I don't know what kind of uptime Ning regularly has, but on Friday morning I came into the office after dropping off my son as school to find the communications staff praying for Ning, as the service was down.

Ning had their sites back up after about 3-hours of down time, but I don't know if this is a common occurrence, or a once off thing. Time will tell.

Ning Customization

bill.hutchison — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:54:37 +0100

Almost all the elements on the page can be moved around the page. You can also choose to disable features on the site for users, make groups public or private, and lots of other stuff. We are using it as a rudimentary content management by adding static pages to the site, which is done through Ning's "notes" feature.

Also, each user has control of their own web page, including the template, what elements can be displayed (but as an admin you make some things mandatory) and how elements display (blog title vs blog excerpt, all photos vs favourite photos, import rss feed, etc.). Your best bet as a user would be to sign up and them completely ~~destroy~~ customise your personal page.

You can read about some of the customisation of Ning on their site here.

Bill Hutchison
Reef to Outback

So that site you linked to

crashsystems — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:43:17 +0100

So that site you linked to is your custom social-networking site? I didn't realize that Ning let you use your own domain name. What other kind of customization features does it offer?

Nervous

Donovan — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:33:48 +0100

I am no where near the paranoid type, but when people use Google for almost everything, it does make me wonder... you use google mail, you use their collaboration tools for sharing calendars and contacts, you store documents, etc. and now your medical records. I wouldn't had all of my personal data over to Microsoft and I don't see Google as any different. By the stuff I already use... Google reader, some mail, etc. they already have enough stuff on me as it is!

the complexity of trust

crashsystems — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:22:09 +0100

When you talk about trusting a company (as opposed to a person), things get rather complicated. In this case, I'd trust Google from a technological standpoint to hold onto such information, provided I used a good password and didn't have a secret question thats answer was my mom's maiden name. Their business model is such that it is in their vested interest to maintain my trust.

The one area where I would know better than to trust them with this data is if it was something that I didn't want to get into the hands of my national government. Any company holding your data is going to comply with a gov issued order to hand over info, but in this case my medical information could be obtained via other means (and I have no medical records I want to hide from the gov). Same thing goes with email. The vast majority of email that I send/receive with my Gmail account is the sort of thing that isn't harmful to ether myself or others. There is the occasional email though, especially when emailing certain people in other countries, where I know I couldn't trust Google. In these cases I encrypt these conversations, and I carefully guard that encryption key myself.

user images in blog posts

neo — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:46:27 +0000

Hi all you Drupal experts. Got a quick question.
So, I got my website up & running and all seems fine. But wanted to have the user images to be displayed in blog posts. Well, basically just like here. But I can't get that to work. Does that depend on the Theme that is used? Does anybody know??
I don't use one of the standard Themes that come with Drupal. So, I somehow think that it depends on the Theme unless I miss the spot where to enable/disable that feature. The image comes up just fine in the user profile but just not in the blog post.

Any ideas? A setting somewhere or does that require a extra Module??
Thanks for any advice.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

YAM - Yet Another Module

neo — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:08:33 +0000

I need to extend the list sooner than I thought ;)

So, I wanted to have a different color for different pages on the site. E.g. blue-ish for the Home page, red-ish for the Blog, brown-ish for About Us, etc. The module "Taxonomy Theme" seems to do it. That makes it about 20 modules now, I guess.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

lots and lots and lots

neo — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:45:51 +0000

Hi Bill,
yes, Drupal needs quite some extra modules. The half dozen you use are really, well, quite few. So far I use (or play with) the following ones:

Backup Migrate (backup for the Drupal database) - backup tested but not restore / migrate
Captcha - not 100% tested
Category Aggregator (enables RSS for categories) - not yet used
Contact Forms - not 100% tested
DHTML Menu (but I'll try and see if the "Nice Menues" is doing it more how I want it to be) - works
Email Verify (to check whether a email address really exists, but I couldn't get it to work)
extlink (adds "target="_blank" for external links + displays a little icon) - not yet used
FCKeditor (WYSIWYG editor) - works but needs proper configuration
i18n (the site will be bi-lingual, german & english) - works
Image - works but I was hoping for more / different functionality
Localizer (directs visitors to the right language according to the browser language) - works
Nodewords (aka "Meta Tags", it actually is for meta tags) - works
Password Strength (to check and force a minimum strength for passwords) - not 100% tested
PDFview (create PDFs from displayed page) - not installed but a wanna have function
Print (printer friendly page) - not installed but a wanna have function
Quote (enables boxes for quotes) - not yet used
Scripturefilter (makes scriptures a clickable link to Biblegateway) - not yet used
Spam - seems to work
Watermark (for uploaded images) - not yet used

So far so good. But I'm really still developing the site. I can't tell if I'll keep them all or if I'll search for other ones. I haven't looked into SEO. Obviously I need the content first before the search engines has some work to do ;)

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo