mightychurch.com

What software are you using, and is this a private venture that you’ve decided to set up as a hobby? Are you the boss here?

;-)

Personally, I’m learning Joomla, which has its own brand new (10 month old) forum software called Agora.

Do you think the template here is a bit wide? I love it, but I have a 23 inch Mac monitor.

Anyway, good on you for setting this up… just wondering what the “unofficial” means. ;-)

ExpressionEngine, baby, with my own custom theme I created for this site :) Yeah just a private, hobby thing. I guess that makes me the boss, haha, but there will be a strong emphasis on the community encouraging each other rather than me intervening, but I will be active behind the scenes too.

The template will stretch to 100%, but the front page is pretty info heavy. I could prob add a max-width to the forum templates though.

Unofficial means I decided to set it up, and did. Welcome aboard! :)

Are you a web designer? I’m having a headache trying to learn XHTML, CSS, phpbb3, database management, Joomla templates and Agora all at once, but hey? It’s all good. ;-)

This is great Luke, I’m glad to see that the forusm will still have a home.  How are you going to deal with the moderation issue if/when everyone jumps over here?  I imagine you don’t have thr time to dedicate your full time to this?

The syndication with the ability to comment is an awesome idea & the prayer request is great.  I was in discussion about building a tool to do that years ago but never found the time to do it, it’s great to see it in reality!

Hi Luke,
again thanks for this. Glen, he’ll just recruit other reliable characters to help with moderation, right Luke?

Anyway, if this can’t upgrade users to help with moderation, there’s always Joomla and Agora. ;-)

(The Agora forums are admittedly a little clunky looking right now, but a little CSS can fix that AND version 3 of Agora is out soon, and rumoured to have some great new themes).

Luke, I’m wondering if ExpressionEngine is really supported? It looks like they are having delays and only 144 modules… Joomla has thousands. Who else uses ExpressionEngine? I’m kind of interested in checking out other CMS. Also, where’s the WYSIWYG formatting for this forum? Sorry if I sound like a demanding pig, but this is kind of my thing at the moment…. trying to understand how people end up moving from one CMS to another. Cheers mate.

PS: Love the theme at the top, but just wondering about this forum functionality. Look and function, why are they always at war? (Sighs).

Dave Lankshear - 19 January 2009 01:57 PM

just wondering what the “unofficial” means. ;-)

Luke, I’m wondering if you might consider broadening the target audience beyond ‘Anglican’ too? For example - Sydney Christians Web Community (with a mention in fine print that you don’t have to live in Sydney or have a Christian faith to participate).

Dave Lankshear - 19 January 2009 02:30 PM

Luke, I’m wondering if ExpressionEngine is really supported? It looks like they are having delays and only 144 modules… Joomla has thousands. Who else uses ExpressionEngine? I’m kind of interested in checking out other CMS. Also, where’s the WYSIWYG formatting for this forum? Sorry if I sound like a demanding pig, but this is kind of my thing at the moment…. trying to understand how people end up moving from one CMS to another. Cheers mate.

Sydang.net do I believe ;)

And if you’re interested in checking out CMSes, have you looked at DokuWiki? I plan to use it for my site. It has a lot of cool and powerful plugins, particularly the blog one, which can also be used for news items etcetc.

Hi Luke - thanks heaps for what you’ve done for “our” community. Very much appreciated indeed.

One suggestion :  rather than call mightychurch “the unofficial sydney anglican web community”, why not just opt for “underground sydney anglicans” ;)

Also, when I joined up, I had to supply a “user name” - but it’s my real name that pops up with my posts. What happened to my user name ?

Cheers, Kevin

Hey peeps, good to see you all here :) I’ve just finished sending off the first bunch of invites.

To answer a few questions:

@Dave L, yup I’m a web designer, good luck learning all that stuff, it mostly involved banging your head against a wall until you figure it out! You get a pretty sore head :s EE is super well supported - they have a professional tech support team & there’s a great community, I’ve been using it for 5 yrs now, wouldn’t swap for the world. WYSIWYG is evil :)

@Glenn, good to see you here :D

This is great Luke, I’m glad to see that the forusm will still have a home.  How are you going to deal with the moderation issue if/when everyone jumps over here?  I imagine you don’t have thr time to dedicate your full time to this?

As for moderation, I plan on being relatively hands-off for the actual discussion as much as possible, and if there’s some drama people can contact me. However I also plan on keeping the membership here made up of nice/sane people, so I’ll be quietly wielding the ban-stick a bit more frequently if I need to. Then if there’s a need for volunteer mods, I’ll be happy to get some of you guys on board to do that if you’re interested, but for now I’m just focusing on getting things up and running! :)

Glad you like the news stuff too, it took some wrangling for the news-news… Yahoo Pipes is a beautiful thing :)

@Angus

Luke, I’m wondering if you might consider broadening the target audience beyond ‘Anglican’ too? For example - Sydney Christians Web Community (with a mention in fine print that you don’t have to live in Sydney or have a Christian faith to participate).

Yeah, hopefully the site will grow to be more than ‘Anglican’ (and Sydney), but for now I want to grow from that point, which means getting Sydney Anglicans on board :) If people are neither Anglican or from Sydney, but the community appeals to them, then I’m sure there will be no probs with them fitting in.

I like the ‘clean’ look of the wide screen. It looks good Luke.

I bet all those dead horses and their riders are just waiting to ride again !

I’m glad you’ve set this up and I’m looking forward to the discussions.

Again it looks good.

Who else uses ExpressionEngine?

Oh, and how could I forget Khoi Vinh at http://subtraction.com/?

Hey Kevin, glad you like it! :)

lol, we’re pretty niche as is, if we were ‘underground’ we might be a bit too niche, but thanks for the suggestion :)
Yeah the username vs full name is a bit confusing, but it means if you have a username you use all the time (ie say, kevin2008 or something), then you can just use that. Though you reminded me that I made the username your full name when I set up the AMS forums heh… ahh we’ll see how it goes :)

Also like the RSS feed.

@Dave L, um, Barack Obama? lol. Some of the best web firms in the world (eg Happy Cog) use it, and yeah I built the original sydneyanglicans.net with it, and they use it to drive all their sites.

@Adam, thanks! I’ll be keeping a close eye on those with an axe to grind. If that’s all they’re here for, they wont last long ;) I’m pretty keen not to let them (or anyone) drag the vibe of the community down, so hopefully this will be a happier place than sydneyanglicans.net forums has/had become.

Adam Olive - 19 January 2009 03:02 PM

I like the ‘clean’ look of the wide screen. It looks good Luke.

I bet all those dead horses and their riders are just waiting to ride again !

I’m glad you’ve set this up and I’m looking forward to the discussions.

Again it looks good.

Yeah, I want to second that! I KNEW you were a designer to whip up something like this! And when I hit quote on the comment above, all the WYSIWYG forum buttons appeared.

I’ve got a group that I’m also trying to convert to either the Joomla/Agora blog/forum combination, but I might go Wordpress/BBpress… I haven’t been that impressed with any of the “bridges” between Joomla and phpbb3.

Anyway, congrats on the site, and if you’ve been using it for 5 years then there’s no way I’d recommend changing! It’s working for you. If it feels good, do it.

Just then I received my new CS4 complete with Dreamweaver… if only it had a Joomla bridge or it’s own community plug ins. Oh well.

Incredibly fussy on my part but I think maybe the quoted bit could be slightly darker to distinguish it from the rest of the post.

And maybe bold the names of the poster and unbold the profile/message to somehow set that section a little more separate from the post.

Just a thought but as i said it looks good.

One thing… are we going to get an email every time someone replies to the same thread? I kind of liked one email I could just “park” in my inbox for a bit until I had time to get it, then log in to see that the thread had moved along a bit.

Thanks for the suggestion Adam, yeah I think I’ll tweak things a bit now I can see what it’s like with people using it.

Dave, you should only get one email notification until you re-visit the thread, same as Syd Ang. Smart notifications are on by default, but if you’re getting different behaviour, let me know.

I’m getting an email for each and every post

Ok, Dave, when do you start your new 15 part peak oil series? Go nuts, mate… ;-)

Hi all,
Love the layout and am enjoying the relaxed vibe. Can’t wait to see where the discussions go.

Just figured out that the RSS feeds are separate for the lounge discussions” and “the general discussions” - now I can watch both!

Luke is their a page which you can look at to see whether a thread is updated? Like the “Latest Discussions” column on the old forums that listed the threads most recently posted to , who and what time they posted. It is helpful to know what is happening just at a glance.

If there isn’t then maybe one could go under the Recent Prayer Requests on the right column of this page. (I have no idea whether this is an easy or hard thing to do).

Luke,
1. Does Expression Engine require knowledge of php?
2. Is there a Dreamweaver compatible plug-in for styling? How easy is styling… just in CSS? Would I be copying some HTML into DW to style?
3. How instantaneous and thorough is customer support?
4. Price… is that for each site you install or for having the software on as many machines as you want?
5. How good are the templates? EG: Would I be able to find an attractive enough forum / blog / web template (kind of like this one) but plug in my own header quickly enough?

I am not sure how to enjoy this link yet. Too used to the old Sydney Anglicans forums format.

I will have to think harder till my brain hurts more maybe.

The format is not as clear cut? what do you think?

It’s the lack of WYSIWYG formatting buttons that makes it harder. People are going to have to remember the code themselves. How about it Luke, is there a formatting button you can please turn on?