This End Up

It's been a busy past couple of months.  Besides the typical vacation/holiday time spent on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's, we also did a few other things before the year ended.  We switched our small group ministry off GroupFinder and onto Arena managed Small Groups.  Thanks go to Jeff Gibson and his team for their go-for-it attitude, data entry/management, as well as training the entire team of small group leaders!

We also just completed our conversion from ShelbyV5 Contributions to Arena Contributions.  Thanks to Michele, Stacey, and the CCV financial team (for spending time answering our many questions) this project was also a success.  There were a few bits of custom code I had to write since we use something called the "Envelope Number" which Arena currently does not support -- but I'm told by very reliable sources (the developers) will be coming in a future version of Arena.

Being able to get back to developing was nice, but it was not the most glamorous of coding tasks.  Does anyone actually enjoy coding label layout and such?  No, what I'm most excited about are two new things from Arena... the Arena Nightly Build (or beta) and the new MyPortal framework.

Although not currently available to all Arena Community Developers since it is still in a pilot phase, I was recently asked to participate in the Nightly Build program.  [Keep an eye out on the Arena Community Developer's Blog for a future announcement.]  In my humble opinion, this is a HUGE leap forward for the Community.  Developers will be able to prepare their next gen Modules before the official release and will also have what they need to foresee any possible conflicts between their existing custom code and the next release.  Potentially they'll also have some opportunities to help find any bugs that are creeping around in the trunk.  Way to go Mark, Steve, Jeff and team!!

The other piece (now in the Arena beta) is the MyPortal framework change.  This seed was planted long ago and we've been discussing this with the Arena developers since the Fall roundtable while Caleb's been busy cranking out the code.  Soon, Arena will have the functionality that will let us develop truly 'personalizable portal modules for our website.  We, the administrators, get to decide what modules are shown (or available for display) on a portal page, and users get to personalize the page/modules.  At first glance this may not seem like an important change, but without it, it can be quite difficult to write modules that satisfy all users.  I'm not going to spend time making the case here, but certainly iGoogle would not have succeeded if their modules were not personalizable or customizable.

The "Upcoming Birthdays" module [insert blog reference here] that Dallon created will really benefit from personalization. (I forgot to blog this in December but will do so shortly.)