Web-Empowered Church Blog

Web-Empowered Ministry Stories and Testimonies

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:01:42 EDT

We are working on a video that will help promote WEC and are in need of additional testimonies and ministry stories. If you'd like to help us expand the web-empowered church movement and to encourage more people to invest in this ministry, please email Mark(at)WebEmpoweredChurch.org. We are looking for written stories and testimonies as well as people who are willing to appear on camera or an audio recording. Thanks for your support. We are blessed to serve.
In Christ,
Mark

Modern Guestbook Upgrade Needed

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:55:58 EDT

The TYPO3 Association Security Team identified a security vulnerability with one of the extensions used in the WEC Starter Package called "Modern Guestbook / Commenting system (ve_guestbook)." Learn more here. We encourage you to update this extension as soon as possible.

If your website is hosted by the Web-Empowered Church / Vine Hosting then this update was made for you automatically and you do not need to take any more action.
In Christ,
Mark

Busy Times as We Relocate Our Hosting Operations

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:22:49 EDT

The entire Web-Empowered Church and Vine Hosting Team has been pretty busy lately since we are in the process of moving our hosting operations to a new data center in Washington Court House, Ohio. Until now, we have been leasing space from a company in Philadelphia. In an effort to provide churches and ministries around the world with the highest level of service and to support our continued growth, we prayerfully made the decision to make this move.

Our old location was smaller and harder to access. Our new facility is over twice the size and includes adjacent office space. In addition, the new facility is in close proximity to additional Web-Empowered Church staff. The Vine Hosting staff and Web-Empowered Church staff have always worked together to support our hosting efforts by connecting remotely over the internet. The relocation will triple the number of local people who can jump in to help with hands-on hardware support as well. We are excited about the increased possibilities for growth and service that this move will provide.

As you might expect, relocating a live hosting facility to a new location 500 miles away is a real challenge. Please pray for our team and the ministries we serve as we work through all the moves and the many related details.

After we move, there will be some other changes. We will be introducing WEC Hosting and Services. Current Vine customers that use the Web-Empowered Church software will become WEC Hosting customers. And WEC will add a full array of services to help you accelerate the process of web-empowering your ministries. If you are hosted with Vine already then you will still be hosted by the same people on the same equipment. We are all the same team, just the names will change to avoid the past confusion caused by two names. The WEC software, documentation, support and training will remain free, but we will provide additional options to purchase hosting and many other website services. Vine Hosting will remain too, but Vine will offer non-WEC-specific Christian hosting for Christian individuals, organizations, and businesses. Perhaps your business could be hosted at Vine. We will provide more details as the move is completed and the transition begins. Exciting times are ahead!

God is Good!
Mark Stephenson

TYPO3 Conference in Dallas

Thu, 14 May 2009 07:57:21 EDT

Last month was an exciting time for WEC as we helped host the first ever TYPO3 conference in North America. For us, the event began on April 15th with some of you joining us for a pre-TYPO3 conference WEC day. During that time, the WEC team spent time teaching on various topics selected by the attendees at the beginning of the event. It was a blessing for us to spend time with some of the WEC Community.

In short, the TYPO3 conference was awesome! Since this was a first, we were not sure was to expect. We were thrilled when over 80 people registered. Attendees came from 20 different states in the U.S. and the international community joined in with people from 11 different countries on 4 continents. The presentations were excellent and taught us more about TYPO3 now as well as the bright future ahead. The social times were great too. Since the event was held in Dallas, Texas, the theme was cowboys and the old west. So the main poster showed cowboys on horses. Presenters got cowboy hats and bandannas, and the social event was a BBQ complete with old western gun fights. For most of us, we were most impressed by the quality of the TYPO3 community. There is a real spirit of friendship, partnership, and mutual respect. In many ways, this is what makes TYPO3 strong.

Due to the success of this event, the TYPO3 Association plans to do this again next year in Dallas, Texas. And like this year it will be held at Irving Bible Church because of their excellent facility and hospitality. We are still working on specific dates, and those will be announced. Next year we plan to add another WEC specific event at the beginning as well. We hope y'all can plan to join us there next year.

Calendar Base Extension Update

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:04:13 EDT

Calendar Base extension version 1.1.2 was recently released. The WEC team is joining with the TYPO3 community to help develop this extension. The extension is included in the WEC Starter Package. The update added a security fixed, fixed a bug where the plugin's week start day was not honored if a backend login was active, and improved error handling when dealing with event categories and notifications. We encourage you to upgrade to this latest version.