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Western PA Site Launches

Posted on 6/29/2009

The WPAUMC.org site is the fourth implementation of our new MVC system and follows in the in the footsteps of North Georgia, Indiana and Iowa.  www.wpaumc.org

Here are a few of the innovations that came along in the course of building this website. 

Videos in the homepage carousel

The first cool thing that we see is that we’ve hand-written the features carousel on the homepage. It uses the jquery framework but by custom-crafting the carousel, it gave us a bit more flexibility. The biggest thing is that Western Penn can feature a video in the carousel and it plays immediately. 
 
On the back-end Western Penn simply has to fill out the “website features” form. If they put a link to a .flv, .wmv or mp4 file in the hyperlink field, the homepage carousel fills that featured panel with a video player.  

Google directions baked into the site

The next nifty new idea is on their “church detail” page. We realized that the Google API would enable us to bake directions right into their website. This means the getting of directions are more pronounced, more controllable and easier on the user since they don’t have to go outside the website to Google to get the directions. It also means that by staying within the site, the user is not presented with ads – ads that the site owner has no control over. 

Image galleries makes its debut

The new images gallery has the following additions:
  • When you build a gallery, it can have an infinite number of images.
  • You can move gallery images around easily by dragging and dropping.
  • Upon upload, the gallery function auto-resizes the image giving you a thumbnail size, medium size and the original. Look here at this gallery and notice how I can click on each image and it brings me to a page where I can get each of these sizes or download the original. This is great if you want to offer higher-resolution printable versions of your images.
  • Also, notice that on the front-end the galleries come “out of the box” with two display types – album or slideshow.
  • And finally, galleries can be embedded via dynamic code snippets into web pages. Have a look at this news article and notice upon refresh one of the gallery images is pulled randomly and it offers the user a link to the “image detail” or a link to the full gallery.