One Man’s Tech Journey with Jesus - Moving On

By Mark Blair

In my last post I talked about how I integrated new discussion features into our little Members Site and how the code I wrote was terrible. I promised in the last post that I would talk about writing good code, but I’ve changed my mind and decided to finish the story because I think its time.

To give the brief summary of the rest of the story, after integrating the members site with some static pages, a Members Directory, and a phpbb forum, I decided to move to an actual CMS. Yes, a CMS. They were all the rage at the time, and there was an endless supply of them. The one I chose was called PostNuke, and it was a fairly popular little CMS at the time along with its father, PHPNuke. I chose PostNuke because it seemed more determined to be completely open source, which I liked, and they had a cool web site (hard to admit but there is some truth in it).

Postnuke has worked out great for us. It has been pretty stable, it had a published module writing scheme that made at least some sense, and there were a lot of modules out there that other people (probably heathens) had written that we could take advantage of, which we did. It also had some semblance of a theming system, which allowed us to update our look every so often. We adapted the members directory to be a postnuke module, we had PNphpBB2 with our forums, and of course took advantage of all the built in News Items, Calendaring, etc, that comes with it.

This setup has lasted up upwards of 5 years now, which in my mind is a pretty long time, given how much our church has changed. But there it is, things do change on the internet if you haven’t noticed, and yesterday’s “awesome CMS solution” is today’s “so what, we’ve moved beyond that”.

So what is this leading to, well, essentially, it’s time to move on, from the members site that is. We are now focusing the vast majority of the attention on The City, which is today’s “awesome Social Networking solution”. If you follow this blog, you’ve probably been reading about it a lot, as the Pastor Zack has put together a great application that meets many needs within our now multi-campus church, much better then the existing Members Site. I’ve had the honor of putting in some features myself, and it’s great to see the next generation of software that will help define the technology of Mars Hill Church in years to come.

Personally, it is actually been harder then I thought deprecate the members site, not because it’s such a great piece of software, but because I worshiped so much through it over the last 7 years or so. Building something like that is an act of worship because I didn’t get paid a dime to build anything (not during those years), and I can only hope Jesus found my worship to be worthy. It’s still hard to hear people today bash it as seems to be a favorite past time of many, and all I can say is, it WAS an “awesome CMS solution”, and yes, NOW it’s “so what, we’ve moved beyond that”. I still think my worship was valid, even if the website is no longer relevant.

I’m also learning that God moves us on, even if we sometimes drag our feet, and it’s time, so, let me say:

Rest In Peace - Members Site