Released this today, I fixed a few bugs and actualy came up with instructions that make it work ;) And more imprtantly I tested it before sending it into the wild this time.
Do these to make it work the way I intended it to work.
1. install plugin,
2. enter your church code, and a data exchange user
3. Disable Auto Create Users
Step 3 is needed so Joomla only authenticates against your F1 database and doesn’t create a local joomla user.
A few months ago I wrote an authentication plugin for Joomla 1.5, that uses Fellowshipone weblink accounts to login to a Joomla 1.5.x website. I was planning on integrating this into the next version of our church website but it looks like we may be abandoning Joomla altogether. I wanted to put this out there for anyone else to use.
Download it Here
plg_f1authentication
Mark
I took apart my first flat panel iMac last night. (this our church theater presentation machine) I upgraded the HD from the stock 160gig to a 750gig.
Getting the front bezel off was a challenge. The scariest part was when I got to the instructions in the take apart that said place hands on hard drive and pull HARD!!! Yes, that is correct, all caps and 3 exclamation points. Instructions like that always make me a little nervous.
I had some heart stopping moments turning the machine back on too.
First try, oops forgot to plug power cable intoback of iMac.
Second try, oops forgot to plug power cable into wall.
Third try, external Lacie drive came on but no video, ugh.
Fourth try, yay, iMac boots from, Lacie drive and everything works.
See the pics:
Last week was one of the most exhausting weeks of the year for me and my family. It was VBS (Vacation Bible School) at our church. Debbie was the director of the whole show and has been working on it pretty much night and day for the last three months.
It all culminates in one week, 5 nights from 6:30 to 8:30. So the stats were, 508 individual kids, anywhere between 353 to 381 kids per night, 112 kids accepting Christ as their savior and leader, and around 320 volunteers.
This year I worked in Registration/Administration and as a Runner. This was my most enjoyable year, working. I got to walk around and see what was going on. In previous years I worked as the director of the theater, so I was running, video/Keynote/Pro Presenter for the nightly drama. The drama is run 3 times per night so I was pretty much stuck there all night.
Here are a couple photos:
Here is a little something I’ve worked on for church. You might find interesting:
dead switch stack
It was yet another busy day at work. With following the live blogs of the MacWorld keynote and all. 
After that though things went south. We had one elementary go offline. We’ve been having problems with it for a week now and today it just decided to give it up. So I spent the better part of 2 hours trying to determine what component of the 5 stacked switches was broke. I determined it was switch 2 but called it a day, since we needed to contact Extreme support to see what they wanted to do.
No backup software
I had a full plate waiting for me tonight to starting with something simple (yeah right). I headed over to one of our pastors homes to help him install a Western Digital MyBook hard drive and included software. I route the power cable through his desk and plug it into his MBP power it on and nothing. I hear it spinning but no lights on the drive. OK, I’ll try my MBP, still nothing. I finally just unplug the power for a minute then it starts working. Now lets move to the software. He already had it installed, so I fire it up. I get a warning that the trial period has expired please purchase a license or enter the code. Just for kicks I click the buy link, then find info on the page that says if this came with a hard drive just enter the code that came with it. No code. It is either lost or never existed. So I’ll try using the software that came with the one I have at home (if I can find the installer). It feels like a wasted trip.
wrong hard drive/tools
Now on to stop 2 for the night. I head to our lead pastors house to swap out his MBP 100gig hard drive for a 160gig. It’s all going pretty well until I need to take out 2 screws to get the top cover off. I have a T8 torx and these are T6. Hmmm, well they weren’t in very tight so my philips screw driver worked. So I continue on. Finally get out the hard drive and I say, “well before I take out the screws on this lets make sure the one you bought will work”. You can probably guess the answer. I told him to buy an ata drive, just like every other Apple laptop I’ve worked in the past 10 years. The MBP uses SATA. Hmmm, we call around, head to Best Buy, pick up a 250gig SATA, get back, unbox it, yes, right connectors it will work. Whew! Oh wait, whats this you need a T6 torx the get the screws out, and yes they are torqued down, no philips trickery here. Hmmm, again. OK I decide I’ll put it back together so he can work, and I’ll pick up a T6 at Sears and come back another time. I won’t bore you with how it wouldn’t power on the first time after putting it back together 
So I roll into home and it is time to veg. That was one day I’ll never get back.
Well I was forced into making some changes at church concerning our web hosting. I’ve since learned from some newbie mistakes. I’ve never hosted a website, so I’ve never looked for a hosting company and didn’t really know what to look for or what questions to ask.
The reason I needed to make a change was disk space. Our podcasting site http://www.pogpod.com is using just under 1.6Gigs of space. It has two years of message mp3s. I think to myself that 1.6Gigs is small potatoes, espacially when you can buy a 160Gig hard drive for your laptop, but in the world of web hosting that can be considered a large site. I wanted to consolidate both the POGpod and Pointofgrace.com sites under once hosting company, for disk space and bandwidth but to also move away from our current provider. The plan we have for Pointofgrace.com may have been good in 2003 but by todays standards is a joke. $75 a month for a reseller account which gives me a whopping 6gigs of space and 50Gigs of bandwidth. Our main site http://www.pointofgrace.com is using almost 4Gigs of disk space and 30gigs of bandwidth a month.
So I found a company HostGator which wasn’t the cheapest and their 2nd tier shared plan was 600Gigs of disk and 6TB of bandwidth. Wow I thought that is incredible. So I created an account, backed up pointofgrace.com and restored it to the new host, changed DNS and viola, the problems began.
The day of changing DNS I stumble across a post in their customer forums mentioning email throttling to 200 emails per domain per hour. Uh-oh I thought, we have 22 employees, plus I send to a mailing list of about 1900 addresses at least once a week. Those both add up to big problems. Investigated further contact the Host Gator and yes, that is the case. Well in one week with the site at Host Gator I know of 2 incidents where we met that limit. This does not make me happy.
Between that, our new mail server being blacklisted by Mediacom’s spam server, and a ten fold increase in Spam, I decided quickly this would not work, so I switched back to our old host until I can find a more suitable hosting company that can meet our needs. That and I found that the Point of Grace account is a reseller account with 4 other sites that will have to be moved also. So this past week has been back to the drawing board, and back to step one.
I still have major space issues with POGpod and need to make a decision soon, this time however I’ve been asking a lot more questions when contacting hosting company prospects.
So last Thursday has been about the busiest day for me since working full-time and going to college part time in the evening. Here is what my day was like:
Wake up 5:15
Go to church for Men’s Fraternity 6:00 (class Quest for Authentic Manhood)
Leave church 7:30 go to Webster Elementary drop off a MacBook I had worked on previous afternoon.
Arrive at my office see internet connection is down (this was a planned maintenance to change our fiber path for our internet connection between 6 and 
ICN has to fail back to previous path because the change failed, connection is back online about 9.
Deal with daily email problems and normal crushing workload
Get a call from ICN saying they have to reset our connection again and we agree to do it right at noon, it will only take 15 minutes they say.
Have lunch, noon comes and goes connection finally goes down at 12:15, we don’t get it back until a little after 1, wheeee.
Deal with more usual work orders.
Leave work early for dentist appointment at 4. Get teeth scraped, cleaned and checked, always a fun time.
Get home about 4:50.
Eat dinner quickly.
Leave with Ethan for Soccer practice at 6.
Soccer practice until 7, get back home about 7:15
Play with boys until 8 put them to bed, this process last until about 8:30.
Now collapse in a heap.
It was very busy but worth it, except maybe the internet outages and the dentist appointment.
Story of inspiration. You can read about him here . To sum his story up, he is a world class, classical guitarist, who in the prime of his career developed a nueroligical disorder Focal Dystonia which abruptly ended his career. He couldn’t control the fingers on his left hand whenever he tried to play the guitar. After much prayer, God led him to continue to pursue his life long love of playing the guitar. In three short years he re-learned how to play the guitar left handed. His music is truly amazing. He was at our services at Point of Grace church for the 4th of July weekend. I bought a CD and spoke to him for a minute. He has a great gift and I wish him the best. Check out a sample of his music at the iTunes store here or on his website here.
So I’m the new IT Director for Point of Grace Church We are going to attempt to do this as a part time position mainly because the church isn’t to the size that we can justify a full-time position of this nature.
I will be supporting a staff of about 25 people. Most of them are part-time too. Since we are a Mac shop my life will be a little easier, but there are about 17 PCs I have to support.
Here are things on my plate so far:
and the list goes on and on…
How was it I was going to do this part-time again?
Actually with any new position like this I have to get the house in order first, then once that is done things should run smooth.
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