Launch – discipleshare.net

So I dropped the ball. In announcing all the sites I rolled out and launched for different organizations in the fall, I forgot to tell about my pet project.

DiscipleShare

(click on the pictures and zoom to see full-resolution screen shots of DiscipleShare’s evolution)

Way back when … (2003)

It originally started as “DisciplesDocs” when we launched it in January, 2003. The we was Bill Spangler-Dunning and I. I was in the middle of my first year of college, doing this project while taking computer science and religion classes at TCU. Bill was wanting a way to distribute camp curriculum to counselors. The idea grew: what about all of the other curriculum that leaders around our region were writing? Couldn’t that be shared too? The site was static HTML pages linking to the curriculum. We also had it link to author profiles — but everything had to be written into the HTML by hand. (I don’t miss those days at all).

Here’s what the profile page looked like. Sweet table action, huh?

The rest of the site wasn’t much better. Here’s the loop (if only I’d known how to write a loop at that point.

And notice how strict and legalistic the language is for the submission procedure. Ugh.

A Framework’s Beginning (2005)

I did a computer programming internship at a firm in Seattle in the summer of 2003. There, I learned C# and ASP.NET language techniques. During summer 2004 I was taking a Theological German course in New England and had some extra time to keep dreaming about other features people would want it to include. What if camps could share pictures, videos, blogs – and network with other camps going on at the same time around the country? (Remember, this was before Facebook). What if the site was built on a relational database model where users could enter the curriculum themselves? That summer (2004) I developed the prototype. In August 2005, we deployed the new version on a server I managed at TCU (aristotle.rel.tcu.edu). At that point, it was just the curriculum sharing.

Then, during summer 2006, between my time at TCU and starting my MDiv at UChicago, I developed the camp/conference section.

While DiscipleShare was about curriculum sharing at it’s core — it expanded to include those features that would eventually become commonplace in social media. Here’re the different layout options camps could choose from (depending on what features they wanted):

And here’s what it looked like for the camps/conferences. This page was for the Servant Leadership Network retreat, led at Eureka College in July 2005, for different regional youth councils around the midwest.

Transition to Kentucky

During my first year at Chicago, our access to and reliance on my TCU server left us vulnerable to the site going down (sometimes for over a week at a time) without having someone on-site to restart and reset the server.

So we transitioned the site to a server at the Christian Churches in Kentucky. Michael Davison, on Kentucky’s regional staff at the time, found a spare box we could use. A fun, weekend-long trip down I-65 and DiscipleShare was back online at its new home.

Ironically, the same thing happened during summer 2009. When Michael moved, our access to that server went. Thankfully I had a backup of the install / database before the server went down.

But DiscipleShare at that point was old and clunky. The open source (software) movement had helped revolutionize internet technology. For DiscipleShare to keep trudging along on an open source curriculum movement, it needed a better framework.

On to WordPress (2010)

In January 2010, I started as Regional Minister for Communication for the Christian Church in the Upper MIdwest. Two months before that, I joined the Disciples Youth Ministry Network (DYMN) planning team. DiscipleShare was going to become DYMN’s as part of a grant they’d received the previous year. My regional position structured some of my time to transition DiscipleShare over to WordPress, an open source content management system. (We also used the Genesis Theme Framework so I didn’t have to re-create the wheel, yet again …)

I “threw the baby out the with bathwater” for the camp/conference sharing. Frankly, Facebook does a better job of that than we ever could. But the curriculum sharing is working better than it ever had before. We also moved it to a cloud-hosting solution and our own domain name. Score!

Here’s the author view:

Our WordPress solution was everything we’d dreamed about from the beginning. And it’s just beginning …

In the coming months you’ll read on this blog about the new features we’re rolling out — including another very soon.