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Front Page News
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An Idea A few months ago Kim Vehon, from our Worship team came, into our office to share a video showing a bunch of phones hanging from wires flashing on and off . It's pretty cool. She wondered if we could do something like that during our Christmas...
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Today marks the launch of our 5th Arena ChMS powered website . This time around it was more of a cosmetic face-lift, and as far as the switch-over was concerned, we used all the tricks we learned last time to make the change very smooth (more on that...
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I've joined forces with an initially small team of developers and artists to form the Spark Development Network ( www.sparkdevelopmentnetwork.org ) and we are creating a new, open source Church Management System ( ChMS ) called Rock ChMS. You can...
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Something I've been meaning to have added to the Arena Custom Module Developer (ACMD) guide is this little known feature that was introduced at some point in the past few years. It's a way to group your custom module's settings as seen here:...
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This year we had a little more than 1750+ kids use the automated check-in system for VBS across three of our campuses. Looking at this graph which shows the number of check-ins per minute, you can see check-in does not ramp up as sharply as we would want...
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Our current church management system has been falling behind. The Visual Studio precompiled website solution we get with the SDK still targets the .NET Framework 3.5 and this morning I ran into my biggest issue to date: I can't use the NuGet.Core...
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When you use a web based kiosk for your attendant-less check-in system , you should think about what's going to happen if your network fails you -- especially if you're using the 3G network. This is what you'll see if the kiosk cannot reach...
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[note: This is an especially 'angry coder' post -- so I encourage the the faint of heart reader to simply skip this article.] Although I hate to admit it, I know there is no such thing as bug free software releases. With testing and a solid QA...
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When we launched our Queen Creek campus at the Queen Creek High School, we decided not to rely on the local network there. Having learned our network reliability lessons when we ran a test church at Campo Verde High School the year before, we instead...
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Here are a few of the things swirling around in my head that make it hard to sleep... thinking about new friends I met in North Africa that live in tents (refugees) and have lost everything due to the revolution having so much side work I have to turn...
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I admit defeat. I can't keep up with all the community posts in the Arena community forums anymore. Actually, I would have to say it started at some point during 2010. I just would not admit it until today. I guess this might also mean the.Community...
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If you're developing complex modules for your Arena website, you'll probably need a tool such as Firebug (a plugin for Firefox) to test how your CSS changes will effect layout in the browser. Once you've used Firebug you'll have a hard...
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My good friend and co-worker, Jason Offutt , recently started blogging over at JsonData.tumblr.com . (Yes, not only is he a developer and an artist, he's also a great writer!) In our spare time, Jason and I have been working on a couple of open source...
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Yesterday I used the "hide" <friend> feature on Facebook and I'm torn over it. For me, the Facebook trend had become something I dreaded because of a particular person I know who doesn't seem to have a day job other than to FB...
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Even before the full release of our newly rebuilt website , it seemed like we were constantly deploying daily/hourly updates from our sprints to several of servers ( UAT , Staging, etc.)... so much so that, being a Lazy programmer , I stopped what I was...
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In February 2007 the guys at Arena ChMS established what was loosely called the Community Developer Board (or CDB). This little known group was comprised of the Arena team ( Jeff M , Steve, Mark , Alfred , etc), Jon and David from CCV , and Phil and myself...
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Last year we decided to take a little more ownership of our destiny so we created " RefreshCache ," the free two day event for church developer teams that use the Arena ChMS platform. We're doing it again, but this year we're breaking...
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" Ignore this book at your own peril. " -- Seth Godin said that about the book Rework by the founders of 37signals . Before I even finished it, I went and ordered two copies for some friends. Everyone will benefit from reading the book, but...
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Have I mentioned how much I love Arena? Here's why - because it can do almost anything you need it to. Let me illustrate with a small example. I recently heard someone say 'oh, Arena can't do that yet' on the topic of integrating twitter...
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Wow, what a week**. Based on the feedback we heard or saw ( Josh , tweets ), some blog posts we read ( Joel , Brian ), as well as Jason and my own observations, we can now say RefreshCache was a total success! While each person had their favorite part,...
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I was writing a query for Reporting Services (SSRS) and I really wanted to use a parameter to allow the user to choose how many of the "top" results should be retrieved/shown. With SQL Server 2005, the TOP expression is now parameterized however...
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Well it's less than a week away -- our first 100% community organized, managed and executed developer gathering for Arena called RefreshCache . I originally envisioned this get together as a very small group of guys (6-8) but we decided to open it...
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In case you did not hear via twitter ( @ourarena or #ArenaChMS ) or the Arena blog , Chris Rivers will be giving a 10,000 foot demonstration of Arena ChMS. If you have never seen Arena in action and are considering a switch from your current Church Management...
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If you haven't checked out Voracity Solutions you should do it now. You already know the guys at Voracity Solutions as Jon Edmiston and David Turner the original creators of what has become Arena ChMS . Among various long term plans and projects,...
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I've been asked by a few people why we decided not to attend this year's roundtable. We've been very disappointed with the 2008.3 release (the problems that it created, the lack of a documented test plan and release certification checklist/sign-off,...
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