Our mission...
Lincoln Lutheran exists to equip young people to be faithful disciples of Christ by providing an excellent, Christ-centered education
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Colophon
Colophon: A Colophon almost always occurs at the very end of a book. It contains factual information about the book, especially about its production, and includes details about typographic style, the fonts used, the paper used, and perhaps the binding method of the book. We play a little fast and loose with that definition on websites.
Infrastructure: Our website is run using Drupal 5.x, an Open Source Content Management System. Drupal is great software, and the Drupal community has been an excellent help in getting our website up and running. The theme for our website is a highly modified version of a theme from the good people at Project Seven. Locally, we use TextPad on the PC and TextWrangler on the Mac for editing and use Adobe Fireworks for graphics processing on both platforms.
Contributors: Running our school website is, by design, a very distributed process. Rather than having a few people responsible for updating it, all of our administrators, teachers, staff members, coaches, parents and students can add content. Some content goes directly onto the website and some must be approved before everyone can see it. I (Mr. Sommerer) maintain our Drupal installation, and designed the theme that we use for the website. The theme is a hodgepodge of ideas stolen from various sites across the Internet. Katie Bockelman is responsible for nearly all of the photographs found on our website.
History: This is the third incarnation of our school website. The chance that it will be the final version is relatively small.
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This is the first version of the Lincoln Lutheran website. It was put together by Dan Hellerich while he was a student here. He also provided a great deal of other useful technology oriented services while he attended and after he graduated. |
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This is the second version of the Lincoln Lutheran website. It was put together by Lloyd Sommerer, one of Lincoln Lutheran's teachers. It was intended to have multiple tabs of information across the top, but somehow there was never enough time for anyone to write that information. |
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This is a working test of how the navigation would have worked in the 2.0 version had more content been available. You can see that the idea of using large graphical tabs that contain expandable content areas developed here. The form it took in version 3.0 turned out to be a little more sophisticated. You can see a working model of the navigation here. |
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This is a copy of the preliminary work on the current theme. Very similar to what we have now with just minor changes to make it work with Drupal. You can play with the front page without any of the Drupal stuff here |
More info: Information about where we are headed in the future can be gleaned from the todo list below. More information about how our current website came to be in the state it is in can be found by reading through the WebNotes below the todo list.
We need at least a link from the staff biography pages to the contact page for that staff member. It would be nicer to include an actual contact form either at the bottom of the biography or in a tab on the same node.
I didn't go with a nice solution for the, so it might be worth revisiting in the future. For now we're using a biography content type with CCK fields and a table view to display the directory. A link to the staff member's contact page is hard coded into the link for their email address.
Upload about 100 pictures from various activities so that the photo galleries have some sort of content. Mrs. Bockleman might have a journalism student do this.
There's not currently a designated place in the heirarchy for reoccuring events that will need their own page or pages. I'm thinking of things like Middle School Fun Night, Homecomming, Prom, The Gala and so forth.
They could all live inside a new "Event" area off of "Lincoln Lutheran" or The Gala could live under "Friends" and the other three could live in "Dances" off of "Activities".
But I'm not convinced that these are the the best solutions. Before I decide I need to think if there are other things that also fall into this category.
update
The dances and yearly events like that will live off of a new student-life category, the gala and such will be under friends.
We should try to anticipate some questions about the new website and answer them with a tour of the website. The site tours module looks like the obvious place to start with this.
I wonder if it could also be used instead of printed documentation for logging in, adding content and stuff like that. If we can do that instead, then this is really urgent, because I have to have some sort of end user* documentation by Tuesday.
*I realize that many people would call me an end user of Drupal, but they are just so high up that they can't see that there are users below even me.
Look at the navigation menu on the left and decide what needs to always be visible. Perhaps "Athletics" should be a main level item. Also worth looking at is whether it would be good for "Alumni & Friends" to be split up on that menu. Also, is there anything that should always be expanded?
Add a create content link to the theme for faculty/staff just like the one from the old site.
Find that elusive football node and add it to the URL alias for activities/athletics/football.
Transfer the text from the Activity Book to the nodes for each activity. Don doesn't seem to know where this text is, so it might be simpler to retype it.
[update]
Derek has entered everything we have from Don. We're currently waiting on most of the middle school and all of the "general" text.
I need to update the topic taxonomy to differentiate between LL scholarships and college scholarships. At the same time it might be a good idea to look at everything in the Academic menu under Current Families and see if working in a Guidance Office section makes better sense.
Joel has two changes to the content on the front page. This content is hard coded into the template for the front page, and probably should exist as a node (or a pair of nodes) instead.
- Could you change the word "beaming" to "beams
- In the final paragraph, could you change "and" to "an"
In the meantime, Scott has done a larger rewrite to the home page, and that update has been applied as well.
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