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

By Mark Blair

In our last episode, I had just completed a new version of the Mars Hill Church members site which consisted of some static HTML pages, and some dynamic PHP pages that was a Directory of Members. This was an interesting coding experience for me, a first time volunteering the skills God gave me for a Church based ministry, and I actually kind of thought I was done with it. You know, did my time, contributed what I could, and now going back to my regularly scheduled life. What I soon learned was that this WAS my regularly scheduled life, even if I was not the one doing the scheduling.

I also learned that the needs never stop, ever. I should have figured this, being in the software development biz as long as I had already. There are always new features, no real useful product is ever really done. If it is, it dies and nobody will be using it for very much longer.

So what happened? Well, the church always had a good public facing site that tended to draw a lot of attention. Shortly after completing my previous work on the members site, it really started to draw a lot of attention due to a feature called………Midrash. All the Mars Hill old timers are like, yeah, I remember that. Midrash was really nothing more then an open forum that any anonymous user could sign up for and post whatever they wanted using any identity they choose to make up. I guess we figured since it was on a Church url, that the discussion would be proper, polite, and appropriate for the Church. As it turns out, the Internet in general is not really that at all, so in retrospect it is no surprise that the things got way out of control on the Midrash. Things really started drawing attention when a Mel Gibson impersonator showed up and declared war on the English. You can read about in a book if you want (something about confessions and a Reverend).

When this all came to a head, I was asked if we could recreate the forums on the members site and remove the anonymity that had caused so much havoc. This was to be a closed forum for members only, so some random nitwit from some random place couldn’t give official church statements to the public like on the Midrash if he wanted. So, I snapped out of the delusion that my work was done, and began doing what so many people talk about these days, I re-factored the code.

I didn’t write my own forum software, that would have been way over kill, I incorporated some forum software called phpbb into our existing system. This including modifying the existing phpbb code to recognize people who had log onto the site using the previously incorporated system. People would log onto the site using HTTP Basic authentication and the phpbb code was modified (hacked) to use that login as a registered user. No anonymous users were allowed. User information was stored in the mysql database, and the apache web server used a module called mod_auth_mysql to authenticate users. Users were added using a user/group tool I created on another website, that was only accessible by staff.

So now on our members site we had some static pages, a members directory, and members forums. All this work took a great deal of time, as most software projects tend to do. I’m not saying this to brag, I’m just saying that I learned that God demands our time and not JUST our thoughts or money. I also learned that I enjoyed the work, and really felt that this was a worthwhile effort, even if it was really bad code I was writing.

I did finally learn to write decent code eventually…….but I think I’ll talk about that next time.

By Mark Blair

Last episode, I started attending Mars Hill Church and around 2001 it was suggested to me that I check out serving in the Mars Hill Tech Ministry.

Writing code for Jesus, what a beautiful thing, in fact, I had never even heard of such a thing. It wasn’t something they stressed at the public University I attended.

So, what did I do? I contacted the deacon in charge of that area at the time, to protect his identity, let’s just call him Jason (some people actually call him Hugh), and asked what I could do.

He wanted me to work on this thing called the Members Site which was a site for members only that at the time was a bunch of static HTML pages that somebody had put together with a little bit of information on them. The design was nice but not particularly convenient. In retrospect, I wish I had saved a copy of it for historical reminiscing, but I didn’t know any better at the time.

The church wanted a members directory, I guess because they were tired of having members call the office looking for other members contact information. Sounded interesting, especially for a guy who had a little bit of dynamic web site experience, so I said sure and started working on it.

The first thing I noticed was that the members site was hosted on a FreeBSD unix sever. This presented a problem to me because the little experience I had in this area of technology was in Microsoft’s ASP (I had some classes in college that used this). So, I promptly asked to switch our site to a Windows NT server, so I could do what I knew (and honestly, at the time I was kind of a Microsoft fan boy anyway). Jason responded that we couldn’t do that because the hosting of a Windows NT server was like 10 or 20 dollars more expensive a month, that’s why we had the FreeBSD Server, and we didn’t have money to spare.

Seems silly NOW in a church with a budget in the millions of dollars, but at the time the budget was slightly less (or, like, really less). So, thus began my venture into the open source software world, and I think that crucial moment has influenced us in that direction ever since, at least with our back end systems. Sorry Microsofties, if you weren’t such money grubbers, it might have gone the other way (DISCLAIMERS NOTE: This last comment is the sole opinion of the author, and in no way reflects the official views or opinions of Mars Hill Church. In other words, Jesus loves Microsofties too.)

So, I had to learn a new language called PHP, and a new database server called MySQL, which is what that server had available to me. I got a book called “PHP 4″, and learned how to write really bad PHP code. I mean, it was bad. To be honest, that is probably the main weakness of PHP, it lets you write really bad code really quickly, and there is a lot of it around, including mine. To be fair though, at the time, ASP was about the same in this respect, as was most server side web scripting languages.

So, I wrote the first version of the members directory, and it served the basic need. So now we had a Members site that was part static pages, and part dynamic pages (Directory), and I actually kind of thought I was done with it.

Not by a long shot.

Next time…..more work.

By Mark Blair

I work for a church writing software.

Wow, didn’t see that one coming.

At least, that is what I would have said five years ago, alright, two years ago even. In fact, sometimes it is still hard to believe, but I’m here. It certainly took a while (in my puny human perspective that is), and I can’t always say I’ve been the most willing participant in God’s plan for my life, but God has a way of overriding what I think and I end up doing what he wants anyway.

My story begins in the year 2000. I was a year or so into my technology career when I moved to Seattle. I was young, eager, had an engineering background, and ready to tackle the exciting world of cutting edge technology that Seattle was so known for at the time. I also arrived just in time for the dot crash. Oops, now what.

Well, by the grace of God, I didn’t actually lose my job at that time, although many of my co-workers did, but it certainly limited my opportunity to do the cool things I had hoped to do with technology when I moved here. I really wanted to do something worthwhile with my skills, I now it sounds cheesy but it’s true. Although the company that sustained me through those lean dot crash years was doing some interesting things, it all seemed kind of hollow when I thought about how everything I did just made some investors a little richer, hardly world changing.

Then came the opportunity that was unexpected. I had started going to this little church that met in the evenings at First Presbyterian Church downtown, you guessed it, Mars Hill. I started in the summer of 2000, and around the end of that year or the beginning of the next (can’t remember exactly), I was talking to one of the staff who suggested that I get involved with the tech ministry at Mars Hill.

What? Tech Ministry? Write code for Jesus?

Sounds interesting, sure, i can help out, why not.

The journey starts…..and the story continues next time.