Life on Snow Hill

“What on earth is a CMS??” you may ask…  CMS stands for Content Management System.  In other words, it’s a fancy, easy way to update, add and edit content on a web site.

First, let me start by explaining why I’m looking at CMS’ in the first place.  (Well, besides the fact that I’m a geek and I like that kinda stuff anyway.)  The church that Becky and I recently joined has asked me to try to do some work on the church’s web site.  The existing one isn’t bad, but some of it is a little outdated and could do with a little bit of a facelift.

So, I set out on the easy (yeah, right!) task of selecting the best CMS for the job.  My first idea was to use WordPress to do the job.  Done deal, right?  Not quite…  It wouldn’t quite handle some of the pieces of the site the way I’d have liked for it to.  So I said goodbye to WordPress for this particular job.

I tried Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, dotCMS, PHP-Nuke, MODx, Plone, and probably 2 or 3 others that I can’t remember.  Now, don’t get me wrong, all of these systems are great systems.  Some of them were just simply too complicated for me to figure out and to be able to administer efficiently.  Others either didn’t have the modules I needed to be able to do certain things, or the modules I did find didn’t work as promised.

Enter Exponent CMS.  I skipped over this one on my first run through possible choices, although I’m not entirely sure why.  Probably mostly because I’d never heard of it.  Anyway, this one has all of the trinkets I needed to be able to include everything the old system has, and more:

• Standard HTML pages are supported (You don’t know how hard that is to come by in some systems)
• An Events Calendar is included
• Blogging ability is included (Great for, say, new prayer requests, etc.  It posts the new ones at the top automatically rather than having to edit an entire page by hand.)
• A News mechanism for site-wide news feeds.
• Forum software is included for an interactive area of the site – great for a Bible Question area on the old site.

So I’m excited about finally finding the software that is a perfect fit for this site.  I was asked about a week ago if I was working on the site.  I replied that I was, but not a word about how much difficulty I was having with choosing some good software.  Now that I’ve found it, migrating content has been a fairly easy task.  We’ll see how the rest of it goes.

There isn’t really much I can say about the events of September 11, 2001 that hasn’t already been said time and time again.  I will say, however, that in my 27 years of my time here on earth, that was the most horrific day of my life.  I was nowhere near New York, DC or Pennsylvania when those jets went down, but the mere idea of our country being under attack was unheard of to me until that day.  Sure, I’d seen the Oklahoma City bombing, and the deal with the bomb at the Atlanta Olympic games, but this was the largest scale concerted effort of anyone launching an attack on my country in my lifetime.

I still remember the morning it all happened.  I remember the faces of the people around me, and the shock and disbelief they portrayed.  I remember the fear and panic that set in on everybody that day.  I remember how everything seemed to just stop in this country, and focus on this event.

Those terrorists got what they wanted that day (Well, except for their 72 virgins or however many it was their god promised them), but they haven’t seen the last of us…

…for now, anyway.  I discovered just today (by browsing around digg.com) that Google was planning to release a beta of their newest product, a web browser.  Enter Google Chrome.

I’m not a huge fan of *everything* Google does, but many people really like the way they handle everything.  For browsers, I’ve just about always hated IE, so I’ve defaulted to Firefox.  It works for me, but crashes every once in a while.  Chrome is only in beta, but I already really like it.

It has a minimalist approach to the user experience – the window isn’t cluttered with options and tweaks everywhere, but at the same time you can’t tweak much behind the scenes either.  Maybe that will change once it is out of beta…  I like the look and feel of it, though.  When you open a new tab, it brings up several of your most visited sites in thumbnails that you can click on.  It also has your most recently added bookmarks.

Oh, speaking of bookmarks.  It imported all of my Firefox bookmarks, as well as the saved form/login information.  I’m not 100% sure if I like that part, but keeping the saved form informtaion across browsers is very cool.

I’ll probably stick with it as long as it is stable.  That’s my only real turnoff for Firefox.  Time will tell…