Website
Nichols-Bethel relaunched its website in March 2007. The driving purposes behind the design were to keep the current congregation informed of the many activites and resources that the church has to offer and to advertise those same activites to visitors and potential new members.
For those of you interested in the technical details of this site, they are offered below:
- Wordpress opensource blogging software (uses PHP, CSS, and MySQL) with a custom theme
- Automatically creates RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds from each category as well as an RSS feed for the whole site. These feeds can be used in any RSS aggregator, as well as services that send email updates when content changes.
- The Podpress plugin uses MP3 files attached to a post to create a podcast. The audio can be listened to on the website using a flash player that buffers the download while beginning play, or by using the RSS feed with free podcast software such as iTunes. We are using this method to publish sermon audio.
- Cross-browser DHTML menu system courtesy of twinhelix.com
- Gallery2 opensource photo gallery software
- PHP iCalendar presenting a calendar that is maintained in Google Calendar and streamed in iCal format
- If you have a Google Calendar account, you can search for the Nichols-Bethel public calendar.
- If you have a calendar program that accepts iCal format, you can use this same feed to update that calendar.