St. Paul's Newsletter and Content Management

By Timothy R Butler | Posted at 1:45 PM

Well, I can't remember if I've mentioned this here before, but for the last three years and two months, I have put my church's newsletter online. For various reasons, I decided using Adobe Acrobat wasn't such a good idea (mostly for aesthetic reasons) and so I convert the newsletter from WordPerfect format to individual HTMLized articles.

For that purpose, I wrote a simple CMS (Content Management System) during March and April of 2000 (that was time consuming, it's one of the only things I remember vividly from those months). Not having any practice at such it took a long time to figure out how to write the system. In fact, other than Slashcode, I was unaware that Free Software CMSes even existed. Never having used one previous, SAFARI (Standardized Automated Format And Retrieval Interface) is a bit different than other CMSes — in fact, in many ways, it doesn't really even resemble other CMSes. For example, at the moment, SAFARI is what I term an “issue-based” CMS, meaning that it divides article sets into issues, like a print magazine.

At any rate, I'm getting ahead of myself. What I was aiming to note in this entry was that I've really gotten my speed refined on posting. Posting a newsletter (30-40 articles) use to take me about three to four hours — that includes reading over things somewhat to make sure nothing gets lost in the translation from print to web, mailing out a teaser to “NewsAlert” subscribers, and updating The Navigator/Site of the Month link on FaithTree.com. The last few times I've posted the newsletter I've actually gotten that down to between an hour and a half to two hours. I'm pretty happy with that, although I've learned some places where SAFARI needs improvement.

This works out perfectly. As some Asisaid.com readers may recall, I started a project to create a new blogging software package in March. In actuality, the new software is version 2.0 of SAFARI, but with many improvements and ideas I've gotten since I released SAFARI IssueWorks 0.90 in 2001 (which differed little from the unreleased SAFARI 2000 that runs my church's newsletter and dated from… 2000).

My idea revolves around some simple concepts that I hope to reveal very soon. If all goes well, SAFARI ContentWorks, as I've nicknamed the new version, will provide some pretty neat stuff that will make posting my church's newsletter much easier and will also have some applications to blogging. Stay tuned.

Tags: blogware

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1 comments posted so far.

RE: St. Paul's Newsletter and Content Management

looking forward to hearing more about SAFARI.  :-) Sound like it might be useful in my future.

Posted by Josiah - Jun 25, 2003 | 10:14 AM- Location:

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