On March 11, 2010, Mark Stephenson gave a presentation at the ICCM conference in De Betteld, Netherlands. The presentation was titled "Using the TYPO3 Content Management System to Web-Empower Your Mission." The unique part about this presentation is that Mark Stephenson conducted the entire presentation from the comfort of his home office in Ohio, USA. His hosts, Daniel Doesburg and Gerard Wijngaarden from the TYPO3 community, worked with Mark to use Skype to do the entire one hour presentation. Mark introduced himself and answered questions via Skype video, and used Skype desktop sharing to display the slides. Response was very positive about this method of presenting as well as the presentation itself. More...

On February 23, 2010, new versions of TYPO3 4.2 and 4.3 were released by the TYPO3 core development team. This is an important update because it includes security updates. We encourage you to update to one of these versions as soon as possible. If you host with WEC then these updates were taken care of for you automatically shortly after the release was announced. If you'd like more information on the release, please see the Release Announcement Page.

We added the following features to the WEC Discussion Forum:

1. Posts and comments are now searchable by indexed_search (site-wide search).
2. You can add a “report abuse” button for community to self-monitor discussions. Any messages reported will get sent to administrators.
3. The author of a post can receive emails of anyone replying to their post (optional).
4. You can embed HTML/Flash in posts for YouTube, Video, etc. – added TypoScript to pageTS.
5. The archive shows only last twelve months and folds previous years in a tree (can click to see).
6. Other minor fixes and updates.

It seems that everyone wants a custom template, but creating original templates can be difficult because you need to know several web technologies (CSS, XHTML, Javascript) plus how to tell TYPO3 how to dynamically create the menus and to add features like login boxes and search boxes. But most people can make minor changes to an existing template without much difficulty. The simplest change is to replace a graphic with another graphic that is exactly the same size and the same file name. This ensures that you do not mess up the template layout and it can result in what looks like a new design. More...

TYPO3 version 4.3 is released and we have created the initial WEC Starter Package for TYPO3 4.3. It includes several powerful features including the revolutionary new frontend editing capability. We encourage you to use this new version. We are running it on the Web-Empowered Church website. However, please plan to make minor upgrades in the next month or two as more enhancements are made. We are planning for another major release of our Started Package within the next 30 days.

Note: TYPO3 version 4.3 requires PHP 5.2. Some of your hosting services may not support PHP 5.2 yet. If you are hosted with Web-Empowered Church (Vine) then you are already running PHP 5.2 and we are also offering our newest Starter Package.

Staff Directory Extension: This is a minor update but we recommend upgrading. This update fixed an issue with displaying multiple departments and added the ability to customize the department separator. We also added a gender and a title option for list and single view. And now the display order can support greater than 128 people. More...

We just released the latest version of the WEC Starter Package for the new TYPO3 version 4.2.10. The package does not have significant changes except for the TYPO3 version Upgrade. Get it here.

If you are running TYPO3 version 4.2 it is important that you upgrade as soon as possible due to a minor security issue. If you are hosting your website with us (Vine Hosting) then that update was already made for you today.

Staff Directory: For this update, we added an optional header for list-by-line view — you need to check a box in the Display tab of the Flexform to enable it. Now you can have two plugins on a page – a list view and single view if you set the multiplePluginsPerPage constant through the Constant Editor. You can also format the display of the first and last name by changing the locallang labels (see FAQ in the manual for more info); this will show up when you sort by last name or first name. Another change is that department records now support multi-languages. Finally, we updated the language file so German umlauts work right.

Discussion Forum: In this update, we added a Spanish and Swedish translation. More...

The WEC book, Web-Empower Your Church: Unleashing the Power of Internet Ministry, is now available is electronic format for the Amazon Kindle. Get it here!

As many of you know, we have spent several months working on enhancements to simplify content editing in TYPO3. All of us are looking forward to this new and powerful feature that will allow frontend editing of content elements and basic page operations. Unfortunately, the release has been delayed several months because these enhancements are part of the release of TYPO3 version 4.3. Version 4.3 is a major release with other new features besides enhanced usability. The TYPO3 Core development team waits until all the software enhancements are ready before they release it. Our current estimate is that TYPO3 version 4.3 will be released in October, but that is just our estimate.