Innerecho Inc. has joined with the Web-Empowered Church team to help with the current TYPO3 usability project. Innerecho is a full-service web company with the unique combination of expertise in creating highly-usable application interfaces and expertise in developing TYPO3-based websites. They have provided the WEC team with several people-friendly approaches to various aspects of advanced frontend editing. All their efforts thus far have been provided free of charge for the good of the TYPO3 community and the Web-Empowered Church. Special thanks to Innerecho for the great work. 

God is good!
Mark

On September 5, 2008, Mark Stephenson was a guest on the Church Insider Talk Radio Show hosted by Shamielle Alston. The topic was Technology and Ministry. Other guests included Mitch from WingClips and Judy Comstock of International Network for Children's Ministry. The entire hour-long show is recorded and accessible on the Blog Talk Radio website.

The WEC 102 online training class is now available in both a new PDF document and a series of updated WEC How-Tos to teach you the basics of the TYPO3 Backend. How-Tos are Flash movies that allow you to see actual screen shots and demonstrations of each step. With version 4.2 of TYPO3, the interface was enhanced and screen shots became out of date. Please feel free to check out the WEC 102 PDF document and the all Flash version of WEC 102.

The WEC 101 online training class uses a series of WEC How-Tos to teach you the basics needed to start building a WEC-TYPO3-based website. How-Tos are Flash movies that allow you to see actual screen shots and demonstrations of each step. With version 4.2 of TYPO3, the interface was enhanced and screen shots became out of date. As a result, most of our How-Tos became out of date and we have been updating those screen shots. We have now updated all the How-Tos in WEC 101. Please feel free to check out the all Flash version of WEC101 here.

If you still need to upgrade from TYPO3 version 4.1 to TYPO3 4.2 then you may want to use the updated and more-detailed upgrade instructions here.

Note: If you are hosted at Vine Hosting then you just need to create a ticket and Vine will upgrade for you.

Kasper (a Christian from Denmark and the original developer of TYPO3) just released a video interview with with Mario Matzulla (the lead developer of the Calendar Base Extension). In the interview, Mario provides an introduction/demonstration of the Calendar Base extension we use in WEC and also help develop. The video is in MP4 format and is quite large (154 MB). You can get it on the TYPO3 website on Kasper's Podkast Page.

In addition, we just released Calendar Base version 1.1.0.

WEC Map version 2.2.0 has been released. The new version has several minor enhancements including: adding a terrain view to the map type selector and map flexforms as an initial setting, using a hierarchical map type control to preserve map space, allowing the Google Maps API version to be chosen from the Extension Manager, adding a new hook to set the center coordinates and zoom level, adding more robust error handling with Geocoder.us, and updating the Google API key signup link. These are minor enhancements but we encourage you to update to this new version.

We have revised the WEC 101 Getting Started Training Manual. The new August 2008 version is updated to match user interface changes in TYPO3 4.2, and we added some other minor enhancements as well. The document is available on the WEC Classes Page. We are in the process of updating the WEC How-Tos as well.

As the WEC ministry grows and people transition, we find that we are in need of more dedicated people on the WEC team. If you are a Christian who is passionate about the WEC mission and experienced in developing in the TYPO3 environment then perhaps God has prepared you to become part of the team either as an unpaid servant or paid staff. If this sounds interesting then please pray about it and contact me, Mark Stephenson, at Mark@WebEmpoweredChurch.com. We are in need of skills in PHP development, CSS, javascript, Web 2.0, user interface design, advanced web design, and advanced TYPO3 website development.

The majority of the WEC developers are now working on the Advanced Frontend Editing project. Our goal is to create a new and greatly-simplified way of editing websites. With frontend editing, you login and browse your website (frontend) to find what you want to edit. Click on the content element to edit it and then view the results immediately when you save. We expect that this will be an extremely intuitive way to develop and maintain your website.

Due to this large project please don't be surprised if you see some different names helping in the support forums and some WEC extension enhancements may take a bit longer.