Bethlehem Church Development Work
Children's Ministry Teacher's Lounge Program
Ellen Puttbach, Director of Children's Ministries at Bethlehem Church, asked me to build a program that allowed her to enter all of the information about the Sunday School Curriculum into a database. She wanted to be able to:
- Search for Lessons based on Age, Date, Lesson Title, or even Lesson Number.
- Add, Delete, or Modify Lessons
- View the full Lesson Schedule without seeing past lessons.
This program, which was built using PHP and MySQL, is currently being used by all of the Sunday School teachers at Bethlehem Church. Below are some details and screen grabs of the program's functionality.
Find a Specific Lesson
The first thing a teacher needs to do is select the Age group of the child. To do this they simply click on the apporpriate child's image. [screenshot]
They are then taken to a screen with two dropdown menus [screenshot], where they can basically run a simlpe SQL query:
Find Lesson WHERE [Date or Lesson Title or Lesson Number] is equal to [Data from MySQL database that is autofilled based on the first dropdown's selected ID]
Clicking "View Lesson" basically executes the query. On this page the teacher can also search for a different lesson within the current age group or select a new age group to view lessons from. [screenshot]
Add a Lesson
This is simply an input form that, when submitted, inserts a new row of Lesson Data into the MySQL database for the Teacher's Lounge. [screenshot]
Edit or Delete a Lesson
Simply gives the teacher the ability to delete or edit any lesson in the database that hasn't already been taught. When the Edit button is clicked, you are taken to the Edit page. The Edit page looks identical to the Add page, except that the form controls are pre-filled / pre-selected. [screenshot]
View all Lessons
This screen is built from the database and shows all of the rows that have lesson dates that have not yet passed. It is shown in sort order first by age, then by date. It follows the same look and feel as the Edit / Delete page, except without the buttons for Edit or Delete.
Customized Movable Type CMS
One of the biggest issues that we faced in creating www.bethlehemchurch.org was how exactly to handle all of the content. So much information would need to be updated almost daily that we needed a content management system. After looking around at a bunch of different systems, I decided that we would go with Movable Type, because it is a very cutomizable CMS. Although Movable type has many great features built in, we needed some custom elements put into place. Below is a list (with details) of those custom functions.
Emergency Alert
This simple feature allows for any CMS user to create a glaring red box with emergency information in to to display on the homepage. This is implemented on the Main homepage and the Youth homepage and is typically used to announce church closings due to inclement weather or major changed in the shedule or certain church programs. [screenshot]
Event Entries
The staff at Bethlehem Church wanted to be able to add information about special events that take place at the church to the website. One of things they wanted the website to do was to have events disappear from the site based on their end date. So if an event is a one time event, it disapears from the site the next day. If the evnt is a week long event, it disapears the day after the last day of the event. This is all controled by a PHP script that I wrote based on the last day of the event. [screenshot]
Ask the Pastor
This is simply a form that, when filled out, uses PHP to send an e-mail message to the Pastor with the name, e-mail address, and message entered into the form.
Youth Section Style Changer
This is a simple PHP script that changes some of the main colors and images of the Youth Section based on the date of an upcoming event. Most of the styles on the youth section are created to reflect upcoming events, and when that event has passed, a new style will be implemented immediately by the script (provided that a style has been created for the next event, otherwise it will default to a non-event-based, default style). This script incorporates a PHP stylesheet. [see the script]