For a number of years I have maintained a website of Sermon Illustrations. It started, and still is, primerally my own resource of illustrations that I draw from for my preaching. However it has grown and now gets about 3,000 unique visitors each month. It has also become somewhat unwieldy as static html and seems ideal for reengineering within Typo3.

My question is which extension should I use as the basis for this? At the moment I am looking at tt_news, but before I spend a lot of time transferring the illustrations is there a better choice?

Illustrations today could be written, audio or video and I need a simple way of entering, categorising and displaying them. tt_news seems to answer almost all of these, the only thing I am not sure about is the ease of displaying what is at present about 150 categories. My initial thought is to split these into alphabetical pages, however I cannot see a way of displaying a list of categories that begin with A and then of another page a list of categories that begin with B.

Any thoughts or ideas would be much appreciated.

Sandy Matheson

Sandy,

tt_news is the obvious one. But maybe WEC Sermons would be a good choice too. Like tt_news, it is probably not a perfect fit, but it fits a lot of what you say and we are currently adding a fancy search capability. One thing that might be cool about it is that it supports resources connected to a sermon like audio and video. You can define as many resources as you would like.

In Him,
Mark

Mark,

I like the idea of using WEC Sermons because of the variety of resource types that can be added and this may well become more useful as sermon illustrations become more and more multimedia.

But one thing I cant see is how to categorise the illustrations? Any suggestions.

Sandy

Hi Sandy! :-)

I apologize if this is a dupe post (computer was acting up on me).

Re: your potential use of the wec_sermons extension, have you explored the "topic" conception? This might fit your need of a "category". I'd be more than happy to chat with you about this. Let me know. :-)

Regards,

Matt

Sandy,

Matt is the current WEC Sermon developer. Matt works with Brian who originally developed this extension. I asked Matt to jump in here. As he mentioned, the sermons extension has a Topic field. And it seems like that field could work to provide categories. The topics are stored in a table so you can select from a list of topics or you can add a new one as needed.

There is also a Sermon Series field that was originally intended for a group of sermons about one topic. Depending on what you need to do, that field might be helpful.

In Him,
Mark

Matt,

Thanks for jumping in. Topic seems to have the potential to operate as a category.

Im my mind I see the site having a A to Z index and when a user clicks on a letter the website will display a list of categories/topics starting with that letter. e.g. if a user selects 'B' they will be presented with a list of categories/topics starting with B:
Baptism
Beatitudes
Belief
Betrayal
Bible ... etc

When the user then clicks on a category/topic they will get the full list of illustrations under that specific heading.

What I can't see is how to create a list of topics starting with a particular letter of the alphabet and then a way of displaying a list of all illustrations in that topic.

I am sure this can be done, but after working through the manual Topics do not seem to be mentioned in any detail and there does not seem to be a way of listing sermons by topic (or I may well have missed it!).

I am sure there will be more questions as I work out ways of customising the extension for this use.

Many thanks,

Sandy

Sandy and Matt,

I wonder if sermon series could be used somehow? I believe the extension can list sermons for a given series.


In Him,
Mark

Sandy -

I think Mark is right. At first glance, "topics" seemed to be the closest thing we have to categories. But your requirement to list/display the categories... leads me to suggest "Sermon Series", even though it's a bit of a kludge (betraying its original intent).

For information on how to configure the view, check out:

http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/extension-manuals/wec_sermons/0.9.5/view/3/6/#id3746679

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have further questions.

Regards,

Matt

Thanks for the suggestions.

I have been playing around with both Topics and Series and got further with the latter.

Question - what was topics intended to be for? In my simplicity I would expect that you would be able to simply produce a list of Topics and from this a list of sermons relating to each topic. Without this what is the reasoning behind this option?

With Series I can now produce a list of Sermon Series with a link to each separate sermon in each series. For my next step I need to be able to achieve two things, (the rest I think from there is formatting).

Firstly the link in the list for the Sermon Series Title need to open a verbose list of all the sermons in that series. At present the link is purely to the description of the Sermon Series, not a link to the content of the sermons in the series.

Secondly I need to be able to find a way of displaying a subset of the Sermon Series Titles. i.e. Those beginning with A, or B or C ... and so on.

Again I would have though the first part of this might be part of the basic functionality of using Sermon Series on a site. As the number of sermons grows it would be very useful to be able to display a list of Sermon Series and then selecting the link to be presented with the full sermon content of that series, rather than a link to the description of the series.

It may be that I am missing something simple here???

Many, many thanks for the help.

Sandy

Sandy,

I think the features you mention are reasonable but they are not all there yet. We defined the data to be stored and then we are building on features. So in the case of the topics, there is very little functionality there. Series can at least be listed in the list of sermons. Right now we are working on the search, but let's get a list of what exactly you need and see if we can get those features added. Please keep looking at the functions you need and let's see what all we need done to make it work for you. So far, all these features are generally valuable to all, so we should do them.

In Him,
Mark