Ward Website Admins Software Stack

[atticusewig]

Administering the Ward Website is rather fill-in-the-blanks,
but sometimes it can be frustrating if you rely solely on
the tools provided. To help me with administering my ward
website, I have created my own software stack.
I wish it was all open-source, but alas I haven't really
looked too hard for OSS (Open Source Software) alternatives.

Absolute HTML Optimizer
[INDENT] This is not OSS, but it serves my purpose well. For those who don't know, the News/Information items you add to the ward website, can contain choice HTML tags. However, if you hit the enter key and add spaces so that your HTML source is readable, the form will change all those enter key presses (newlines is the technical term) into '
's and completely change the overall look of your document.
This program takes your readable file and removes all the newlines, spaces, and so forth, so it is just one long stream of characters that you can post as a news/information item. In our ward, we have a news/information called Ward Business, that lists the Releases, Callings, Baby Blessings, etc that are announced in Sacrament Meeting.[/INDENT]

CopyWriter
[INDENT]Also not OSS, this is a Notepad replacement with a few extra features. The most notable are the ability to read unix-formatted textfiles normall, and a running total of the number of characters in your document. That way I can be sure that my News items stay within the stated limits.[/INDENT]

MailThem
[INDENT]Okay, this isn't OSS either, but It allows me to send HTML emails with inline images rather easily.
Basically, this is a mass mailing program that I use to handle notifications of ward calendar events instead of burdening the LUWS mail-out system. I detail how I use this in another thread, so I won't repeat it here.
The OSS software I found was a commandline tool, so I wimped out and use this one that has the annoying habit of putting a "Mailed by MailThem" line at the bottom of each message, unless you use a hex editor to modify this of course. [/INDENT]

Unxutils
[INDENT]This is OSS software. Finally. Basically it is a Win32 implementation of the GNU utils (grep, sed,
etc.) with two extra commands specifically to linkup the windows clipboard with stdin and stdout. It is great for search and replace options, or for searching for errors in records. I also use these as part of my Email Notification System, that I mentioned appears in another post. [/INDENT]

Okay these are my key components of my Ward Website Admin Software Stack.
I would love to hear what other Ward Website Admins use to help them with their
ward website, and hear suggestions are really good OSS software I can use in place
of some of these proprietary (albeit freeware) utilities I'm using now.

Thanks,
Atticus Ewig

[AileneRHerrick]

I use Microsoft Word to type up notifications of invalid email addresses. Mail Merge can be used to enter desired names, and other information. Then just print all the letters and mail.

Ailene

[tlrogers]

I used Firefox iMacros and OpenOffice Macros to automatically format and push changes to the ward website. Would take care of logging in and adding or changing information.

I would then keep a copy of what was on the websites locally on my computer to allow modifications to be made locally before I pushed to the web.