Jeff Segars » Web-Empowered Church

T3CON10-Dallas

jeff — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:09:20 +0000

Perhaps it’s been a bit too long since my last blog post. Â About this time last year, I was announcing the first ever TYPO3 conference in North America. As a quick recap, T3CON09-Dallas ended up with attendees from 4 continents, 11 countries, and 20 US states from 4 continents, 11 countries and 20 US states. Based on the feedback we received it was a great time of building community and picking up technical knowledge from TYPO3 experts….and a great time of eating way too much BBQ.

What could cause to me break my year long silence? Â Of course its the return of a TYPO3 Conference to the Dallas, Texas area. Â We’ll be back at Irving Bible Church from May 20-22 for T3CON10-Dallas. Â Full details are available on the conference website, but I’d like to add a little personal information on why I think this is a valuable conference for anyone working with TYPO3 regularly.

We’ve put a lot of effort into finding the right mix of presentations for extension developers, site builders, and site administrators. The North American TYPO3 community is currently heavier on site builders and administrators than extension developers so we’ve expanded our schedule to have two tracks targeted at this larger group. Â The developer track remains and has a lot of great topics this year, but we wanted to expand the schedule so that site builders and administrators have more topics to choose from.

In addition to these formal presentation, we’ve added “5 minutes of fame” and “Birds of Feather” to the schedule. Â Each of these are informal times to show off your work or form small groups to to discuss common interests and ideas. Â We hope these sessions connect people with one another and are a starting point for further collaboration.

Another addition to the schedule is “TYPO3 911 / Mentoring.” Â The goal in these sessions is simply to work through any TYPO3 issues you may be having by pairing you up with a skilled developer or administrator. If you stop for a second and consider normal support costs, it becomes pretty clear that these sessions alone make T3CON10-Dallas worth the cost.

For any churches using Web-Empowered Church and TYPO3, we’re also offering a special WEC Day (May 19, one day prior to the conference) at the same location and staffed by the full WEC team. The exact details are still being worked out so keep an eye on WebEmpoweredChurch.org for more details.

I’m looking forward to T3CON10-Dallas and hope you’ll be able to join us. Early registration is available until March 26 and regular registration until April 30. Â Be sure to sign up soon!

Sneak Peek: Frontend Editing for TYPO3 4.3

jeff — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:09:39 +0000

At the Web-Empowered Church project, we use TYPO3 exclusively and promote it to any church looking for a solution for their website. One of the great things with TYPO3 is that we rarely run into situations where we tell a church “No, you can’t do this” but on the flip side, simple tasks are often more complex than they should be. After spending a lot of time thinking about usability, we really focused in on enhanced frontend editing as the best way to help our users. We were excited to see the TYPO3 community also identify frontend editing as a key feature for TYPO3 4.3 and quickly signed up to work on the project. Here’s a quick look into our progress so far.

Main Features

AJAX loading and saving of editing forms.
Drag and drop of content elements.
Clipboard support.
Support for traditional templating and TemplaVoila.
Architecture in place for more advanced functionality, such as managing news articles, pages, etc.

User Interface Mockups

With the key focus of this frontend editing project being usability, we wanted to be sure we got the user interface right from the start. For this, we turned InnerEcho, a Dallas-based company skilled in both user experience and TYPO3 development. This was a great pairing for us as the guys at InnerEcho were already well aware of TYPO3′s capabilities and limitations. It’s also worth noting that they were gracious enough to jump in on this project on a volunteer basis in order help the whole TYPO3 community.

The mockups you see below are among many provided by InnerEcho and show the look and feel we’ll be shooting for in a final release.

Both new and existing content elements can be moved via drag and drop.

The editing interface is loaded via AJAX and content elements are dynamically updated on save.

Functional Prototype

In addition to the screenshots above, we do actually have a working prototype. The video linked below shows our enhanced frontend editing actually working within TYPO3. Â No magic or trickery involved at all! You’ll see that AJAX loading and saving works, as does drag and drop of content elements. Â We still have plenty of work to do in integrating the InnerEcho-designed UI and in making all of our client side code work correctly across multiple editing actions but its exciting to see the foundations of the system working properly.

Watch Demo Movie

What’s Next?

I had the privilege of attending T3CON08 and the TYPO3 Transition Days in Berlin last week and was able to give some demos and gather feedback from both TYPO3 consultancies and core developers. We were very encouraged to see the enthusiasm about getting this feature into TYPO3 4.3.

We’ve got some refactoring of TYPO3′s existing frontend editing that should go into TYPO3 4.3 Alpha 1 and then we hope to have the new frontend editing in the core by the first beta release. If all goes according to plan, we should have some great new frontend editing functionality as part of TYPO3 4.3 in late January 2009.

An Introduction

jeff — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 06:15:17 +0000

So it appears that I’ve finally thrown in the towel and joined the blogosphere. I’m sure you’ve been anxiously awaiting this day, but what could have sparked a development of this magnitude?

(For those of who you don’t know me, let me make it clear that this is firmly tongue in cheek)

Let’s start from the top. My name is Jeff Segars and I’m a web developer with the Web-Empowered Church ministry. WEC develops open-source software for churches using the TYPO3 Content Management System. I spend the bulk of my time developing TYPO3 extensions and working as a member of the TYPO3 Core Development Team.

I plan to keep this blog narrowly focused on web development within TYPO3. I’ll throw in the occasional release announcement or status report from WEC, but the bulk of the content around here will be the nitty gritty details of TYPO3. Sounds exciting, I know!

(Yes, I do realize that I’m blogging about TYPO3 from WordPress.Â Hope to remedy that soon but there’s no denying its a quicker option to get something up and running with a decent template)

WEC Starter Package and Demo Site

jeff — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 05:42:45 +0000

As Mark mention on the Web-Empowered Church Blog, we had a couple new releases last week. We released a new version of the WEC Starter Package that has been updated to include the mm_forum extension and the rgsmoothgallery extension.

We’ve also added a public demo site at http://demo.webempoweredchurch.com where you can preview and download WEC Templates. There’s some interesting stuff going on behind the scenes with this demo site, which I plan to cover in a future post.