Ever since the early days of Cambray’s Site there was a commitment to publish the what’s in in this month on Sunday. Early versions of the site used Frontpage to publish it via a specified dial up number requiring the use of the same telephone number. This meant that it could only be updated by one person. As I tried to move away from this model, I tried incorporating an inline frame.
I used blogger and my own webspace to update this monthly teaching information. This was a step forward as I could update the page using my all you can eat dial up package, without any extra dialup costs.
I never had really worked out how Frontpage 2000 and 2003 could update a single page easily and it hated any code changes done by other software.
I began to realise that I could use the advanced features of blogger.com to update a whole website potentially. I tried that out only to find that the free nature of blogger created problems with access. It was great not have ads but when I tried to use the email to blogger feature and advertise it in the church magazine for people to test out it flopped. The spammers had bust the email to blogger service. I racked my brains trying to find a solution to a common look and feel with blogger templates and Contribute. It never really worked. I could see that a content management system was the way to free the site from one person updating the site. Contribute was easy to use, but it involved Contribute on each website publisher’s machine, and it was £80 a time or so. Enter Luke Radford and Dreamweaver with Contribute 2 solution with a better design.
I moved the site from www.cambraybaptist.org to www.cambray.org and to a paid for hosting site with www.oneandone.co.uk. Those cheap domain names were the draw at first.
Progress again as we now used cambray.org only but I realised that blogger.com(advanced use) acted as a cms and seemed to use a database, as far as I could work out. Redesigns with Contribute and blogger could easily break the links. A nightmare.
I looked at Content Management Systems especially at Opensourcecms.com.
I tried using php only solution on the server for updating , no MySQL. The test site at Interspire.com looked like a solution, and they offered free installation. It was too difficult for me to sort. I tried java based blog called thingamablog. I got it to work, testing it out on my webspace. It was good for a no ftp solution from one PC.
I decided that a MySQL database solution was the answer. I looked at Interspire again and I was going to buy a CMS solution from them.
What happened next was that I came across www.minehead-baptist.com when researching podcasts and mp3 sermon downloads for the cambray site. The Minehead Baptist webeditor was keen on accessible sites , a wish list of mine too. I was delighted to find a reproduction of the now closed site at www.hosea.co.uk on his pages at minehead baptist. I had drawn on the advice at hosea for our site.
As I clicked through I came to his web design site at http://www.jpc-design.com/ and a link to his wordpress powered blog.
I clicked on the link to WordPress. I thought famous 5 minute installation ? Oh yes sure! It was about 15 -20 minutes to install and get working. I was delighted.
Now I had a tool that was close to what I had wanted for about 4 years, something for the church website at cambray.org.
