Devotional Journal Extension

Overview

The WEC Devotional Journal ("WEC Devo") extension implements a devotional with a private personal journal for each user. A devotional is writings/articles or Bible passages helping people to devote themselves to and focus on God and spiritual issues. While this extension is designed for churches and ministries, and devotionals in particular, the extension can support any content. This extension also supports, but does not require, a private journaling feature that enables a user to record notes and thoughts about the current content.

Devotional: A key feature of the Devotional Journal is the ability to present scheduled content with tabbed categories. Content entered into the Devotional Journal is given a start and an end date that defines when it is schedule to appear on the Devotional Journal page. That duration could be any number of days but it is typically a day, a week, or a month. Content for the future can be entered any time and will appear when it is scheduled to appear. The Devotional Journal also supports categories of content that are accessed by the user via different tabs. The content under different tabs can have different start and end dates. For example, a daily devotional could have a tab that displays a weekly summary, a tab that provides a daily thought, and a tab that provides a daily scripture reading. In this case, the content under the daily thought and daily scripture tabs would change each day, but the content under the weekly summary would remain the same for an entire week.

Journal: The journal feature enables a user to type in notes while reading and pondering the current devotional. The journal entries are synchronized to the time of the scheduled content so the journal entries stay with the content. A user can view previous content and journal entries by navigating to a different day. Since journal entries may be personal, they are only accessible to the logged in user who entered them, and for added privacy, the data is stored in an encrypted format. The journal uses a rich text editor which provides basic word processing features like adding bold or italicize text and changing the text foreground or background color.

Optional Group Discussion: An optional online group discussion can be added using the WEC Discussion Forum extension. This is a separate extension that can work with the WEC Devotional Journal.