The WEC extension eBible has been experiencing some growing pains over the last couple of months. The extension was built in 2007 by the Web-Empowered Church team in cooperation with eBible.com. Since then, the eBible.com site was acquired by another company and some of the features for our extension went away ... at least temporarily ... and all of the features stopped working at one point. Last week, the WEC Team finished reworking the WEC extension so that verse parsing works (the feature where a link and hover box appear when a biblical reference is moused-over as shown in the illustration). The Verse of the Day feature is no longer available, but may be returned sometime in the future.

If you've been an avid WEC Blog follower for any amount of time you've likely noticed a couple of changes here at the ol' WEC HQ. Probably the most profound is our increasing energy in working in site-specific design, creation, and extension modification and implementation. Over the next two posts we'll share some examples of what we've been doing in all our "spare" time.

This week we want to introduce you to Christ Fellowship Church in South Florida. This church serves 30,000 folks on multiple campuses and also serves over 10,000 people through its live streaming services. Their Communications Department had secured a design from an agency, but wanted that design implemented via the TYPO3 framework.

Most of you may think of the Web-Empowered Church team as a web developers, but we are pleased to assist churches and other Christian ministries with other technology needs as well. From April 29th to May 8th, Mark Stephenson, the Director of WEC, and his son Thomas with be assisting a United Methodist mission team (Team Churches: Church of the Resurrection in KS, Granger Community Church in IN, Ginghamsburg Church in OH). They are traveling to Petit Goave, Haiti to install fixed broadband wireless internet at various locations around that city. Sadly, about 1/5 of the people in Petit Goave died from the earthquake in January 2010. More...

Get your own customized iPhone App to give mobile access to your online ministries. Let us build an iPhone app for your church or ministry and put your message in the hands of anyone with an iPhone, iPod Touch, or an iPad. We'll even get the app in the iPhone App Store so it's available everywhere! 

You can learn more on the WEC iPhone App Page or get the App that we created for Ginghamsburg Church to try. The App is called "ginghamsburg" and is available for free.

The latest state-of-the-art in server computing for websites is called cloud computing or just the cloud. It gets it name because it adds virtualization software that makes the server computers more flexible, expandable, and reliable. We have now deployed cloud computing technology for the hosting services we provide to give us and our users the added benefits of this advanced technology. Host with WEC to get your website on the cloud. We offer shared hosting or your own virtual private server. We can host WEC-TYPO3-based websites or other website software as well.

We have just released the latest version of the WEC Starter Package which includes TYPO3 version 4.4.6 and updates to the extensions.

Staff Directory (2.1.2) - You can now add extra fields through TypoScript - dbShowFields and feUserFields. Fixed a TCA error. Fixed FE a photo upload security issue.

Devotional Journal (1.8.0) - Updated the templates and CSS. Added support for different RTEs for the journal (RTEenabled TS constant). Added RSS feed support (include an RSS extension template to activate). Allow journalOnObj and journalOffObj in Typoscript. More...

Brad Linberg shared briefly on the WEC Forum about how he found WEC. He wrote:

A year ago, my church asked me to redesign our website. At the time it was simple and effective, yet mostly static, and in need of an update. My daily work life involves all types of web design with the help of programmers who supplement the creative with a good dose of database development or dynamic scripting. Without many resources (namely thousands of dollars for programming work) available, I set out to craft a new identity and structure for our online ministry. But what about all the great functionality that comes with a website of today? Particularly one with easy to use administration for non-web savvy volunteers. I was about to give up hope until I stumbled upon the WEC and Mark Stephenson's book Web-Empower Your Church. So I purchased the book at a local store and read through it the first few days while surfing all the WEC online classes and tutorials.

The new book Web-Empowered Ministry: Connecting with People Through Websites, Social Media, and More written by our own Director of WEC, Mark Stephenson, was released this month! You can get it now wherever books are sold including Amazon and Cokesbury. The book is a complete revision of Mark's previous book with many additions including discussion on use of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Skype, Google, and more. See a book review on the United Methodist Publishing House website.

WEC has upgraded and enhanced two extensions recently:

WEC Discussion: We added width/height in constants to get around an issue with TYPO3 4.4. We also added a German translation, thanks to Robert M., and updated the Spanish translation. Printing was also improved. And we fixed some incorrect links in the documentation.

WEC Staff: We made improvements to interface with the Map extension. We updated the verbose template. We also added a french translation thanks to Laurent B. And we fixed some incorrect links in the documentation.