Coders for Christ

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 below).  The bulk of the switch took 8 seconds (scripted), about 1 hour of minor ...

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:   The effect is subtle, but when you have 20 or so settings like we have in our ...

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 decided to put some trust into the 3G cellular network. So far it's been pretty ...

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 has become a pretty successful tool for certain things ArenaChMS! Anyhow as ...

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 time trying to manage without it. That's great for Firefox, but what about IE?  ...

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 from Central. Since that time a few more churches were invited to the team (Joel & Daniel: ...

"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 anyone who's writing software, is running a business, wants to start their own business, is ...

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 with our website.  Not true.  There's no need to wait for a ...

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, I think we're all in agreement when I say we came together ...

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 up to other Arena community developers.  Invitations were sent out about a month ago ...