We went to a new church yesterday, Fellowship Baptist Church in Dublin which seemed to be a much closer fit to the kind of church that we were looking for. I cracked up though when the first song that the (very talented) pianist played was the UK National Anthem – I almost felt like standing up and saluting. Apparently the national anthem is also a hymn over here. As it is Memorial Weekend they also faced the American flag and said the Pledge of Allegiance, the first time I’d heard it said in a long time and probably the first time that Kristen had said it in 6.5 years.
The church had powerpoint for the songs with none of the fancy animated backgrounds which was great AND they even had the projector mounted on the ceiling (fancy that Danny!!!!)
The music was an interesting mix of old hymns (but played at a good pace) and also new songs.
The preaching was excellent, with some humour at times but not too much with a pretty energetic pastor who walked around the platform but again, not too much that it was distracting. They are about to start a new series on Sunday evening with two disciplines – one of which is learning Greek!
They do need a new website (do I sense some steps forward?) but it is good to see that their calendar of events is uptodate.
It’s all very well having moving backgrounds for powerpoint images at church (although they are distracting) but it really is a bad idea to have an animated background image of a lightning storm when people are trying to read the words in a darkened room – it’s enough to give anyone an epileptic fit. (Danny I don’t think WHBC are quite ready for this yet!)
I went round a friends house on Tuesday night to teach them how to manage the church’s website which runs under Mambo (which I’m starting to regret installing!). Unfortunately this person only has mac’s in the house and doesn’t really know much about the technical side of a mac apart from using word, email and graphical/music packages. He wanted to install a copy of mambo onto his own mac so he could play without distrupting the live server. However mambo needs mysql, php and apache installed. Thankfully apache was already configured but php wasn’t working – it was just displaying the files as text files. However when I searched for httpd.conf it didn’t come back with any details – instead I had to open terminal, change to a directory in /etc and then vi the file – only to find it was readonly, owned by root and when I asked for the root password I was met with a blank stare. I then used netinfo (i think) to remove the asterix in the passwd file for root, changed the password, logged in, edited the httpd.conf and hey presto – php was working. Undo the root passwd setups and then onto mambo installation.
This worked ok until we got to the sql installation as although mysql was installed, we couldn’t find a frontend to configure the databases and couldn’t find anything in google…I thought Mac interfaces were meant to be really helpful and friendly? This one certainly wasn’t.
Anyway, we carried on with testing on the “live” site and discovered that we needed a way of uploading files, specifically mp3 files, to the mambo server but you can only seem to do this if you are the administrator of the server. Not much use for giving users the ability to upload certain files and pictures.
The next solution was to use ftp, so does anyone know a good, easy to use (gui), free, mac ftp client?
Alternatively anyone got any alternatives to running a cms website that allows registered users to upload files (like a blog). I might just start again with an installation of WordPress – might be easier.