I wanted to take a moment and wish everyone in the openworship world a merry Christmas!

May this glorious day find you all cherishing your time together with family and friends. Most importantly, may you all cherish the Saviour of the world on this day that we celebrate His birth.

Glory and praise be to our God and His Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ!

Thank You, God, for the blessing You have bestowed upon mankind, even in spite of our sinful nature and our lack of deserving such a great Gift. May the people of this world find their eyes opened over the course of this holiday and the beginnings of a new year.

May we who have accepted Your lordship in our lives be busy about the work You have made ours to carry out. Let us glorify You in all that we do and share the truth of Your birth and sacrifice with those who know You not.

Amen.

We love You, Jesus. Happy birthday!

As Raoul recently shared, “The land of openworship has been quiet recently, but don’t let that fool you, there’s been work going on…” Well, he is right….

We are proud to present you all with a new openworship website design and revamped content. Over the last day, I have been switching out our CMS software to deal with a few bugs we encountered with RSS feeds from the openworship blog and a few other areas. While we were at it, we tried to tie in the current design with the design of the openworship application (which can be sneak peeked at here). You will notice the new openworship logo at the top of the page.

The new CMS also makes it a bit easier for those working with content. Our previous CMS made creative writing unpleasant for some users. *You know who you are.*

We have also enabled much nicer URL’s within the CMS for search engine optimization and the like.

You will also now find a link to the live IRC web-based chat client on the Support page.

We hope you enjoy the site and find it useful. Any suggestions that would enhance your experience with the openworship site are most welcome!

The land of openworship has been quiet recently, but don’t let that fool you, there’s been work going on…

Kevin and I have completed all the major templates, and have created rudimentary Mako templates (Mako is the templating system we’re using). I’ve created the main controllers for the site.

Joshua and Michael have also been busy, taking Kevin’s notes on the database and converting them into code. I took a look at the code, and arranged a meeting between myself, Joshua and Kevin, and we’ve finalised the last few database design bits. Joshua and I will be meeting in a few hours time to go over the database tables and the models, and so that I can show him how to join the models to the tables, and the models to each other.

Once the models are done, we can start getting stuck in to the meatier coding. In the mean time, we also want to upgrade openworship to run on the latest version of Pylons, which should be released fairly soon. I’ll most probably be taking on that task since I’m the most Pylons-experienced person at the moment.

All in all, we have been busy, and we’re all excited to be working on this together. From my side I can say that I’m working with a really great bunch of guys, and I couldn’t wish for a better set of team mates!

So some folks might be thinking and asking “Why Python? I thought you were going to use PHP?” so I have decided to lay down our reasons for choosing Python over PHP.

Firstly, we reckon that most churches will want to install openworship on their internal network (which will most certainly happen in countries where the cost of Internet is high, e.g. most African countries). Since they will be running their own servers, getting Python, Pylons and openworship working will not be a problem.

For those folks who don’t want to run their own server, and those who are happy having their system on the Internet, we are investigating a hosted solution. This would mean that a church can pay a small monthly fee to have openworship hosted for them, reducing the need for them to know how to run the server and to watch out for software updates and the like.

Secondly, by using Python and Pylons, we’re going to be developing things a lot faster.

Python really speeds up development time. It’s a powerful and concise programming language, and I’ve been really impressed with it recently. Python is also a very “readable” programming language. This means that it’s easy for new folks to quickly get up to speed, and it’s easy to find bugs.

Pylons is an application framework, which means we have less groundwork to do and can get on to developing the important stuff. Coupled with Pylons are a variety of open source Python libraries that make working with databases, templates, and other things much easier and faster.

So at the end of the day, choosing to use Python means it’s easier for us to develop, and it’s not difficult for others to get openworship up and running.

Hello everyone! We now have an IRC channel setup on irc.freenode.com. The channel name is…. you guessed it, #openworship. I am still learning the in’s and out’s of managing a channel. If it doesn’t appear in the irc.freenode.com channel list, just try connecting to the channel manually, it should be there.

God bless,
Kevin L.

Over the past two weeks, Raoul and I have been working back and forth on the design of the openworship web app. The overall skeleton for the site has been pretty much completed. After the overall layout was completed, our next focus was the main page of the “Songs” portion of openworship.

You can view the overall layout by visiting http://open-worship.org/design/.

The “Songs” main page is located at http://open-worship.org/design/songs.html.

Our next page of interest will be the main “Scriptures” page. Once we have the main navigation pages completed, we will begin to focus on the sub pages, such as the “Add/Edit Song” page, etc.

We are really excited about the work the Lord has been creating through us. It is an amazing experience to see a work for the Lord materialize before you. We are certainly looking forward to see the work continue to grow before us and emerge into a software that is God honoring and that better equips God’s people to perform His work.

In Him,
Kevin L.

Hello everyone! Welcome to the first blog post at open-worship.org!

There are some exciting things going on in the world of openworship. We want to help you keep abreast of it all! In an effort to keep everyone up to date on the happenings around openworship, we have started this blog in addition to the publicly available developers’ mailing list. If you haven’t checked out the mailing list and subscribed… well, what are you waiting for! Do it already. You can access the developers’ mailing list by using the link on the left of your screen.

Feel free to subscribe to this Blog’s RSS feed. The link to the RSS feed is located at the bottom of this page! As new blog entries are posted, you will be notified via the RSS feed.

Well, that is it for now. Look forward to a post about the design element of openworship that we have recently started. That and more to come, just keep your eyes open!

Til then, God bless!

Glad the tomb is empty,
Kevin L.