Is the WEC Template Viewer available as an installable extension?

Henry,

Currently it is not available just because we did not see a need for its use by churches. If you have a real need, I suppose we could get it to you, but unlike our other public extensions, it does not have a document or support.

In Christ,
Mark

Hi Mark,

I'm beginning to support various Churches in the initial installation of Typo3/WEC. Often times they have questions about how their sites would look with various template implementations. The Template viewer would provide an easier way to show them some of the alternatives.

I would think the tool would also be helpful for individual churches as they are going through the process of making template choices.

I'd appreciate the opportunity to work with the tool even without Documentation.

Hi Mark and Henri

You are right Henri as we would also appreciate this tool to present the templates in advance - especially as we could present different flavours with accessing the backend. On the other hand each Template would need to be installed in the backend too and therefore you could easily demonstrate new templates thru the backend - that is what we are doing.

I send all my customers to the http://demo.webempoweredchurch.com site and they can choose a template start with, then I install this template and they can start immediately. I also make a copy of this template and that is the one we are customizing for the customer. At any time we are able to switch back.

Works

The Tool it self is also a great chance for WEC to tear people on their sites - we should not forget this and this is good so as we need more and more people using this system.

Perhaps you are in a similar situation like me - I need to do my living with setting up websites, therfore the tool would be great to present OWN templates - but as the tool offers a download option without payment my own ideas would be gone very fast or?

God bless you for your great work
Andi

I think you understand where I am coming from very well, Andi.

Clearly, we should be driving as many people as we can to this community. We share common values and goals and are achieving those things through the great technology work that the leadership of the community is making available to us. It is a goal of mine in my work to encourage the participation of the congregations that I work with in being/becoming part of this community.

Unfortunately often times the folks that I work with are not so patient or able to see the choices that are available for their specific sites. They are not in a place to learn how to login to the backend, find the menu item for the WEC_Config tool, find the drop down for changing templates or worse yet, go through the steps to learn how to install a new template that is not already existing in a new WEC starter installation that might work well for them. I do point folks also to the demo.webempoweredchurch.com site, and this helps them to see the possibility of certain implementations, but inevitably they need to see how various templates might be implemented with their own information and specific branding in repeated and inconsistent order. And I'm not always available to make the change when they need to see it at a specific time.

I would not suggest that this is the case for all churches. But many of the more hierarchical congregations I am working with, would benefit from access to such a tool, in order to perform church leadership level review and decision making.

Henry

Here is the instructions for the Template Viewer:

* Download the template viewer extension from:

http://svn.webempoweredchurch.org/files/projects/misc/wec_templateviewer-0_0_1-r.t3x

* Add the following Typoscript to the setup portion of the main Typoscript template. The first line is only needed if you want to make template downloads available from a certain location.

plugin.tx_wectemplateviewer_pi1.t3dPath = fileadmin/template-downloads/
page.1 < plugin.tx_wectemplateviewer_pi1

In Him,
Mark

Hey guys,
I'll throw in one other bit of info that didn't make it into my original instructions that Mark posted.

In the WEC Starter Package and Template Viewer, we split the templates up by series. TemplaVoila doesn't have any notion of a series of templates so we just rely on a naming convention..."Beautiful Creation - 3 Column, Blue" = "Series Name - Template Name". If you're only using WEC templates, this won't affect you at all as the naming conventions are already correct. If you're using custom templates, however, be sure to adhere to the naming convention or you may run into errors or other unexpected behavior.

Thanks,
Jeff

Thanks Mark & Jeff,

This will be really helpful in my work with congregations and I would think for others as well. A very nice Extension!!

God's Shalom,

Henry

Henry,

Great. I am pleased that it will be helpful. It has sure been nice for our demo website. Note: it runs slower because it cannot cache the pages due to all the template changes.

In Him,
Mark