Our Story

“Honda Mousetrap Ad”:http://multimedia.honda-eu.com/newcars/300k_player.swf. This is one of those rare email forwards that is actually worth passing along. Honda Europe designed a fascinating mousetrap-like ad from Honda parts. The result is incredible to watch. Read the details and then click the link below. “More info”:http://multimedia.honda-eu.com/accord/index.html at the Honda (UK) Accord site. (via my mother-in-law)

There are NO computer graphics or digital tricks in the film you are about to see. Everything you see really happened in real time, exactly as you see it. The film required 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually very minor, didn’t work. They would then have to set the whole thing up again. The crew spent weeks shooting night and day. By the time it was over, they were ready to change professions.

Honda executives figure the ad will soon pay for itself simply in “free” viewings. (Honda isn’t paying a dime to have you watch this commercial!) When the ad was pitched to senior executives, they signed off on it immediately without any hesitation — including the costs. There are six and only six hand-made Accords in the world. To the horror of Honda engineers, the filmmakers disassembled two of them to make the film.

Everything you see in the film (aside from the walls, floor, ramp, and complete Honda Accord) is parts from those two cars. The voiceover is Garrison Keillor. When the ad was shown to Honda executives, they liked it and commented on how amazing computer graphics have gotten. They fell off their chairs when they found out it was for real.

Oh…about those funky windshield wipers. On the new Accords, the windshield wipers have water sensors and are designed to start functioning automatically as soon as they become wet. It looks a bit odd in the commercial.

As amazing as this is, the commercial is actually based on an earlier film from the 1970s called “How Things Move” by two Swiss self-destructing artifacts artists.

P.S. Some sharp-eyed folks claim that tires rolling UPHILL necessarily require computer-generated effects. Not so. The sequence where the tires roll up a slope looks particularly impressive but is very simple. There is a weight [in each] tire and when the tire is knocked, the weight is displaced and in an attempt to rebalance itself, the tire rolls up the slope.

It’s official: the Village Church site is now running on WordPress, the open-source content management system. The migration didn’t take a lot of time, but was spread out over a number of nights and weekends. I’ll go into detail about the actual implementation, but, for the uninitiated, here are some the main advantages of using WordPress.

h3. Advantages

h4. Lowers the geek barrier

Anyone who can use the web can use WordPress. WordPress, in the vein of other popular blogging systems, makes publishing on the web as easy as writing a Word document. You don’t need a Computer Science degree to use it, or even to be very technical at all. This is huge in “democratizing” our web presence — it lets more people take ownership of it.

h4. Quicker updates to content

The overhead involved in updating HTML by hand is significantly greater than typing in a web form and clicking submit. Plus, kludging together HTML code by hand — even if it’s cleverly organized, efficient HTML code — just sucks. WordPress makes posting on the web quicker, easier, and, quite frankly, more fun.

h4. Huge development resources, sweet plugin architecture

When I constructed the Village Church web presence, the church was able to take advantage of my talent, background, and free time. When we implemented WordPress, we’ve suddenly tapped into the vast resources of a thriving open-source community _plus_ any third-party plugin developers. Yesterday, I found out that the “contact form”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/contact/ I wrote (“which had it’s own issues, anyway”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/09/14/secure-contact-forms/) broke after we moved over to WordPress. Whoops. That meant I had to slap together a quick replacement. I had it done in about 30 minutes by using a plugin which is more robust, maintained by much better developers, and is _way_ simple to implement.

h3. Implementation

So, on to implementation. The Village Church uses “Pages”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages pretty extensively for our static content (such as the “About”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/about/ section), which were able to reproduce the pretty URLs we had set up with the old site. Aside from the Contact form I mentioned above, the News and Sermons are the only “Post”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts content we have on the site. We’re using “Categories”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Manage_Categories_SubPanel to determine where a post should appear: if it’s News, drop it on the homepage, if it’s a Sermon, drop it in the “Sermon archive”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/. We also have put conditions in the individual archive pages to change the display, based on what category we’re looking at (“here’s a helpful article on that”:http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/09/22/creating-multiple-single-posts-for-different-categories/). That way, Sermons and News items don’t look like each other. We’ve also set up a Featured category (which is a child of Sermons) which floats a copy of the sermon information to the top of the page, making it easy to feature or un-feature content. There is also a little include file that show the latest Sermon on the homepage (“using WPDB”:http://codex.wordpress.org/WPDB).

Initially, I thought our “Events”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/ page could work this same way, where each event would be a Post with an Event category. I found that after testing this, though, that it was very kludgy. WordPress is just not meant to be a calendar, and it’s *really* not supposed to be a calendar mixed with other content types as Posts. In the meantime, the calendar is still a page of hand-coded definition lists, but we’re looking for a better web-based calendar (and preferably one with an “iCal feed”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ical/) to make our church administrator’s life easier. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Speaking of feeds, the Village Church is now sporting some spiffy XML goodness. WordPress makes it dead simple to syndicate any content by adding a /feed to the end of any URL. Want a News feed?

“http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/news/feed”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/news/feed.

This makes Podcasting “laughably easy”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Podcasting:

“http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/feed”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/feed

This link works in iTunes without a problem, so I published it to the iTunes “Religion & Spirituality” directory. You can now subscribe to the Village Church in iTunes. We’ll hold off on announcing that, though, until I write some warm and fuzzy “getting started” content “like WNYC”:http://www.wnyc.org/about/podcasting.html has.

Migrating our site design wasn’t trivial, but wasn’t really hard, either. Since we’d already moved everything to valdiating HTML/CSS, putting in the WordPress tags instead of static content was just a matter of time. We also needed to work out some of the text formatting on the pages once we were done with the design.

The implementation of WordPress isn’t huge in terms of adding features or new functionality, but it does create a stable platform for us to build on as we continue to bring more of our community experience to the web. Things like comments, adding more types of “Worship” content (not just the Sermons), and involving other ministry leaders in posting their own material will enable others outside the church to see what the Village Church is all about.