Launch – www.stbenedict.ws

Fridays — often a minister’s day of rest.

With my hybrid vocation, I often still work on Fridays.  And yet, the days still keep some of their retrospective character.  I can look back at my tasks for the week and give myself a sort of score card.

Publicly, I can share some of my recent work.

So, let me set the situation. In June I promised my wife a new website for her church by the end of the summer. Fast forward to the fourth week of August and I’m presenting a workshop at the School for Congregational Learning about congregational website setup and maintenance using WordPress. I get home from a long weekend and Heidi calls in the promise. The summer was almost over and she was missing a website.

Rather than doing everything custom, I retrofitted a stock theme (http://themeforest.net/item/light-of-peace-wordpress-template/120416) to work for her setting.

• I replaced the logo with an “Episcopal” customized one with the Episcopal Shield.
• I added a custom post type for events (treating events like taxonomies and as collections of posts so that any updates to event pages show up in RSS feeds).
• Customized an RSS widget to automatically track the Revised Common Lectionary readings for the week from the Vanderbilt Divinity School Library’s website (http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/)
• Some other UI tweaks of features that didn’t fit her congregation.

Thankfully, a team from her congregation transported most of the content from their old website to the new one.  They were also experts of this type of fall cleaning: they mercifully cut out lots of garbage or outdated information from the old website.

The site’s live at http://www.stbenedict.ws/