Christ Fellowship Redux

Like most people, I was quite busy during the Christmas season, but perhaps for different reasons. Due to an unfortunate circumstance my wife and I were unable to travel to visit my family as planned. However, I ended up being quite productive, because I was able to work on the front-end templates for the redesign of Christ Fellowship – a 20,000 member church in Florida.

Shortly after the relaunch of Stonebriar’s site, my friend Jason Reynolds was hired on as the CIO at Christ Fellowship. While I was sad to see him leave the Dallas area, it was a huge career opportunity for him. One of the first things he needed to tackle at the new job was overhauling the church’s old site. He assembled a solid team that made it happen on a tight timeline…

• Jason Reynolds — PM
• Chris Merritt — Design
• Ron Hall — TYPO3 Template
• Jeff Segars — TYPO3 + PHP
• Myself — XHTML, CSS + JavaScript

As far as technical implementation, Jason was concerned that without yet having hired any full time front-end developers, the code be easy to manage in the future. Initially, he suggested YUI Grids because he liked the modular approach. Shortly thereafter, Jeff Croft pointed me toward Blueprint.

This was my first project using Blueprint CSS, and for the most part I found it to be pretty well thought out. I don’t agree with all the presuppositions it brings to the table (namely 10px gutters being too narrow), but it helps speed development in a team. Overall, here’s what went into the site…

• Blueprint — CSS framework
• jQuery — JavaScript library
• hoverIntent — jQuery plugin
• innerFade — jQuery plugin
• TYPO3 — Enterprise CMS

I guess that wraps it up. Hopefully you’ll find the multi-campus approach to be intuitive as a whole. It was a cool project, one that afforded me the chance to build some pretty fun JS widgets. If you have some feedback to improve things, Jason would be happy to hear any constructive suggestions.