Asbury Theological Seminary Version 3

December 08, 2008

Today I stopped by Asbury Theological Seminary to visit some of my old coworkers. As it just so happens, or maybe because of some super-human ability I possess that allows me to smell technology in the air, they had just relaunched the website.

As some of you may remember I announced a few weeks back that I was leaving Asbury. This edition is the last site with which I had been working for Asbury. At the time of my departure it was still awaiting approval and a few changes to the language used on the site. When I reflect back on this particular incarnation of the Seminary’s site I have a few observations.

My role was very different in this round. Mostly it was my responsibility to make sure Expression Engine was properly configured and ready for a daily thrashing once the site had been launched. I also worked with the XHTML and CSS, but did not have much say at all about content, navigation or all of the other things with which I typically work.

I was also asked to create an ActionScript 3 driven photo and video player for the front page of the site, though that was not completed before I left Asbury. The final product was pieced together from the elaborate and overly complicated jig-saw puzzle that I had left for Kaleb. He did well with getting that prepped for launch.

One of my main goals this time around was to make everything more portable. With OneATS (Asbury’s portal system) in place I didn’t want to have to double manage the same content on two different systems, but yet I wanted to allow the data to be accessed from both the public and private sections of our site.

To do that I wrote a small pseudo-API that allows us to pass information back and forth between the systems. It ties in with our Employment postings, Podcasts and RSS feeds and allows us to take a hands-off management style to those elements.

For me, this project was about changing our methods and processes. The simplification of information is quite a change in and of itself, but the portability of data will also make things different on another level. Apart from the design and the structure, that should cover almost everything. Hopefully users will find the site useful, I know that it has been a paradigm shift for me.

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