Church of the Resurrection

Church of the Resurrection

I'm glad to say that Church of the Resurrection has re-launched their site. I did the site design and front-end code several months ago, and since then they have been converting thousands of pages of content to the new design. As was the case with Stonebriar, some code compromises had to be made in order to accommodate the TYPO3 content management system.

While small HTML discrepancies used to bother me to no end, I'm realizing that compromises are inevitable and necessary with any sufficiently large website (see the discussion about Apple.com). Church of the Resurrection is rumored to be the largest United Methodist Church in North America. However, it is my understanding that there are much larger congregations in Korea.

In a way, the conversations leading up to the COR redesign started several years ago, when Asbury Seminary alumnus Chuck Russell emailed me. At the time, he worked at the United Methodist Church headquarters, and told me that I should look into TYPO3. I did, but ended up settling on Textpattern as more my style.

Still, we kept in touch, and when he took an IT job at COR, we started talking redesign. I would be remiss if I did not also mention Brian Slezak, who did all the server-side implementation, in PHP and TypoScript. They even have a cool XML driven Flash video player, courtesy of Blip.tv. Overall, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, and am thankful for Brian and Churck's patience with my perfectionism, ranting about client-side code.