Launch of a Mult-Campus TYPO3 Site

The first of the year found me pretty busy helping to put together a large TYPO3-driven site for Christ Fellowship in Florida. We launched the site last Friday at gochristfellowship.com. This site has some unique features that will give me several blog topics in the coming weeks.

• It is the first site I put together as XHTML strict. Normally I use transitional but we went for strict and didn’t have any validation nightmares.
• It serves up content for four campuses. Some content on any particular page is common to all campuses while other content is only for 1, 2 or 3 campuses. Jeff Segars put together an extension to sort all of this out.
• Multi-column FCEs are used to provide flexible layout options. They are put together in some unique ways that I plan to share in the near future.
• We are running the site on a development version of TYPO3 4.2. This is not something I would normally recommend on a production site but we were able to do it because of having Jeff on board. I am looking forward to 4.2 being released as a stable version. It has some nice features.

It was fun working on this site. It had to be coded pretty quickly but came together more easily than I anticipated. And we launched on time.

There was good team working on this site which included:

• Jason Reynolds (churchcio.com): Jason is on staff at the church, ran the project and particularly kept us on track with SEO.
• Chris Merritt (pixelightcreative.com): Chris handled the visual design of the project and put together well-thought out interface for this site.
• Nathan Smith (sonspring.com): Nathan handled the front end code, and as always, delivered squeaky clean XHTML, JavaScript and CSS.
• Jeff Segars (jeffsegars.com): Jeff is a personal friend and really knows the inside of TYPO3. Jeff’s day job is programming TYPO3 extensions for the Web Empowered Church (WEC) effort.

One of the great things about this project is that I have known all of these guys for quite some time. This helps tremendously with the trust and confidence needed when working a project via skype and e-mail.

More to come on the techniques used on this site.

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