RocketTheme

Just wanted to show off a site that we completed a few months ago:

It was for a church in Lima, Ohio called the Crossroads.  Here is the site:

Crossroads Church of God - Lima Ohio (http://www.limacrossroads.org)

Components used: Podcast Suite, Facile Forms, sh404SEF, XMap, Jcal Pro
Theme: Dimensions by Rocket Theme
Plugins and Modules: Allvideos plugin, Extended Gallery
produced by: Moseley Web Solutions in conjunction with Hannsidal Express: Hannisdal Expess provides Video, Web, and Print Media Solutions (http://www.hannisdalexpress.com)

Many thanks to all the kind people that helped me out along the way.  There are probably too many to thank!  And thank you to the great people who release open source code!

Sincerely,

Stephen Moseley

Hey Stephen,
Thats a pretty tasteful site :)

Im expecting to be building quite a few church websites this year, so its good to see what little gadgets people are employing.

What did you use for the podcasts mate?

James,

Thanks for the complement! :)

I used Podcast Suite by LeBlanc

You can find it here in the extensions:
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,255/Itemid,35/ (http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,255/Itemid,35/)

This thread in the forums was indispensable for getting it set up.

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=138839 (http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=138839)

I did a fair amount of tweaking to it myself though to get the output to be XHTML valid.  It is by far the best for podcasts though.  Sets up the XML file that iTunes grabs and automatically updates it.  It really DOES podcasting.  A lot of the others don't.

Hope that helps.

Steve

thanks for the info Sir :)

FYI - IE6 is doing your site NO favors. I know that IE6 is a terrible browser, but a lot of people still use it, which is why I look at everyone's site at least once using it. You may want to install the PNG fix bot. It looks good in FF though.

Nick,

Thanks for the notice.  I've had that happen to me too, but sometimes I re-fresh and it goes away.  I developed the site checking regularly with IE 6 and Dimensions comes with PNG fix included.  During Development it was fine (a pain in the BUT, but fine).

However, I think the cache component and the PNG fix are clashing with each other a bit.  Still, I've asked the church to keep me in formed as to "the site looks crappy" remarks, and I haven't heard too many reports of crappy looking site from the church.

I don't have the link right now, but I saw an article where a top level tech guy in Microsoft was trying to figure out why the Alpha filters flake out - these are things the PNG fix uses.  So I think they are a bit unstable.  Next time?  no transparency for me. 

Thanks again though....I'll keep an eye on it.

Steve

Once when I had this issue on one of my sites. I found out that the reason behind the PNG issue had to do with the way that Adobe Photoshop renders the PNG out. I had to reprocess them through Fireworks, then the problem magically went away. It was really strange. I spoke with another guy on here who had the same issue, and he did the same thing and had the same results.

Do you use Adobe Photoshop (or maybe Elements)? If so, you can re-render the images through Fireworks, and it will almost always fix the problem. If you use Fireworks, then it's probably the cache plugin reeking havok.

Nick,

Yeah, I use fireworks.  Saw that others had the same problem as you with Photoshop, so I went ahead and got Fireworks.  I actually really like it for web stuff.

If I clear both my caches (joomla and other cache component) and then re-fresh with IE 6 everything is fine.  I'm guessing it still isn't fine for you?

Let me know if it isn't.  Maybe I can turn off the cache program and have you take a look at it after that to see if it is still blocking up because it is good on my end.

Thanks.

Steve

looks great now.

Ok, Cool.  Thanks for checking.  It really is weird because I've had people tell me that it looks bad, but on my end it is good.  I guess I'll just keep it as it is for right now - maybe look into the cache thing.  Thanks for the help.

Steve

Does the Extended Gallery also make the reflections in your thumbnails or did you have to do that manually?

Nope it does that automatically - there are some other effects too but I don't remember them off the top of my head.

One of the nicest sites here.

About the Login:

The font color for User Name & Password is hard to read, and the text boxes are hard to see against the back ground.

JEM618,

Thanks for the kind words.  The site really isn't meant to be much of a community site at this point.  So I sort of wanted them to blend into the background as much as possible, but still be readable. 

You are right though that it is a bit hard to see.  If they desire more community interaction in the future I will probably change it to a more readable color.

Steve

Hi,
Nice Job!

Tell me,
What are you using to display your videos? and what did you initially use for encoding?

Thanks in advane and God Bless!

Richard,

Well, for displaying the videos in the Video Gallery, I'm using All Video's plugin, but I hacked it so that the output is more standards based.  Most media plugins use the combination of the "object" and "embed" tags since "embed" is better supported even though it is a non-standards compliant way to embed media. 

The video player itself is JW flash player.  I believe All Video comes with this, but I did some configuring of it to make it look nicer. Check out the tutorial section at this site and it should tell you all about the flashvars you can set (or you can use the setup wizard and copy the code)

http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player (http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player)

As far as video encoding, they are encoded for the web with .mp4 and H.264.  Initially, most of them were played on TV.  I guess that would make it NTSC?  Sorry, I don't do the videos. :)  If you want I can ask the guy that did them.....

Hope that helps,

Steve