Christian Web Resources

Wow! The reality of our history just sank in - ImpressCMS is about to enter its 5th year! There have been 4 major releases and 12 other final releases during that time, along with all the alpha, beta and release candidates in between. With the release of ImpressCMS 1.3, we have embarked on an entirely different path, one where we have begun to unload all the additional weight of (poorly structured) legacy code. When Marc_André and I were planning for the 1.3 release, it became clear we did...

As we settle into our new environs on Assembla, it would be good to invest a little time in getting ourselves acquainted with the layout and features, but also to establish some practices that will serve us well, no matter where we manage our code and development.First of all, we still value everyone's contributions - designes, graphics, news, tutorials, themes, modules, help in the forums, site maintenance and core development. ImpressCMS has long had a strong commitment to open source and t...

Each year since the launch of ImpressCMS, we have monitored the opensource marketplace to pick up trends, refine our top features and gauge our progress. water&stone, a digital agency that promotes and uses opensource content management systems for their clients, has been conducting surveys since 2008 of what they view as the Top 20 opensource content management systems available. Once again, they are conducting this open survey.ImpressCMS did not get listed or even mentioned in the f...

With ImpressCMS 1.3 Final due by the end of September, some of your may not have picked up on what is on the horizon for 1.4, yet. Time for the discussions to turn to how to make ImpressCMS 1.4  a reality.When 1.3 was launched, it seemed rather simple in scope and definition, but it really was much more than it appeared. It was our first major step in changing our thinking about the development of ImpressCMS and looking at ourselves with a fresh perspective. Changing technology forces us to...

So, if we're going to try to lower the barriers, we need to know which barriers to lower - right? There have been some great comments, forum posts and email exchanges about what comes after ImpressCMS 1.3. The biggest challenge we face is putting all this into action and getting some things accomplished, wouldn't you say?If you haven't read the earlier posts, I suggest you take some time to do so - the background is significant and so is how we think about our future. Here are the links -Blog...

Barriers tend to create stress. People get frustrated and discouraged, some may even get angry or hostile. Not all tension is bad, though. Your heart beats because its muscles tense and relax. And, the Akashi-Kaikyō bridge, pictured above, is another example of how tension is used to span a very large gap. Without tension, the bridge would collapse. Without tension, your heart would stop beating.

In my last post, I presented an idea for taking ImpressCMS to the next stage of its life and introduced the principal of "Lowering the Barriers". As promised, I'm going to dive deeper into this over the next few posts, just to shed a little more light on this. First, a little video.

As we are nearing the final stages for ImpressCMS 1.3, it's about time to have a look ahead to the next stage of life for the project. These last 18 months of work on the core have gone on quite a bit more than I ever anticipated - it seems that Smaller! Faster! Better! was bigger and took longer to get better. But, now we are here - where do we go next?All along, ImpressCMS has been using phrases like "Open source, open development, open philosohpy and open community." We made some amazing p...

Some time ago, Vaughan posted in the blog a new method available for sanitizing variables based on their type - checkVar().Well, rarely are you dealing with 1 variable at a time. Usually, you are trying to handle input from a form or process the variables passed in the URI. So, we needed a way to handle the process with the least amount of effort and building on work already completed in the core. In straight PHP, you have several different filter functions - filter_var(), filter_input(), fil...

It's been a busy week since FSOSS 2010, but the extra hour this morning because of the time change is giving me the opportunity to get this post written.Both Marc-Andre and I traveled to Toronto for this annual event that caps off Open Source Week. Seneca College has been hosting this event for 9 years - next year will be their 10th anniversary, so we're excited to see what they have in store for us!We both arrived the night before our presentation and had the chance to meet up with a fe...