Coders for Christ

I dig the latest version of Arena ChMS and the new Document Types feature is great.  In a nutshell it allows you to attach documents (pdf, images, .doc, etc.) to a person, tag or group.  It's the feature that enables you to move to a paperless office and it's super easy to setup. Last week a super admin, Kim came to me ...

If you're not familiar with a UAT environment, it's the place where your users can perform either formal testing or just simply kick the tires of the latest version of your system/application (depending on how formal your "testing" really is).  Most corporate environments have a UAT environment for their mission ...

With the current release of Arena (2007.2.x) there is no "E-Ticket" feature, which means if you enable it for one of your online registrations it will attempt to link to a page/file that does not exist (~/eticket.aspx).  Luckily, this also means you can easily write your own! With very little work I created a ...

I yearn for and typically choose only elegant solutions, but in times of desperation it's not beyond me to use a hack to accomplish something.  I'm not proud of it, but I do see it as sign of my practical side.  I also don't enjoy javascript, but I don't know where I'd be without it in my toolbox. A ...

I've been working on an Arena "search connector" control that talks with our Microsoft Search Server 2008 (SS) in order to provide a seamless search integration with our Arena powered website.  Ultimately, I think we're probably going to be bailing on this new product... It's been a challenge to get ...

One of the things I think we'll need to address within our Arena ChMS Community is the ability to have (manage) multiple developer custom projects.  While its possible to do this without a tool, its terribly inefficient and not recommended. SharpForge is an open source .NET 2.0 (C#) software project hosting web application that ...

Lately I've been getting lots of questions about my experience with Arena.  The last set of questions were particularly well thought out so I got permission from the good people (Zana and Win) at Christ Chapel Bible Church to share their questions and my responses with anyone who is interested.  I guess this post will only be of ...

Registration is now open for the next Arena Developer Roundtable taking place in sunny AZ this October 16th and 17th.  This time the roundtable is also open for prospective Arena Community Developers to participate and understand the benefits of joining the community. What happens at the roundtable?  Well, based on the last one, we ...

I had a MS Media Player 11 / driver / registry mishap last week and ended up having to wipe and reload my system. :(  Thankfully, since Arena ChMS is web based, I was able to find an old spare computer with IE and continue working on most of my website construction tasks while my system was being reloaded with the ...

This past Friday we upgraded to Arena 1.1.  The new Import/Export capabilities allowed me to easily install a custom module we developed called "Tag Finder".  It was written in less than a day, and simply put, it gives you the ability to search for tags.  Since tags are hierarchal (compared to ShelbyV5's ...