Do you have some talent in C#, PHP, or MySQL that you'd like to put to good use for the sake of helping churches? Maybe you know a little and would like to expand your skills and end up with something tangible to show for your effort. Or perhaps you'd like to learn new technology like WPF or LINQ on a real-world project. Whether your an up-and-comer who just needs some guidance or an old pro just excited about contributing, your help will be greatly appreciated. All development work can be done using Microsoft's free version Visual C#.
If you're interested, please post to the Help on new features welcome thread in the Developers forum with information about your talents and any specifics you may have about how you'd like to help. A great way to get ideas is to first take a look at the Feature Requests for this project.
Sermons on the Web consists of a database (MySQL), a web application (PHP), and a smart client (C# / Windows Forms). The C# program converts WAV files to MP3 (for the web site) and WMA (for archiving). It uploads the MP3 files (usually with FTP) to the web site. It also updates a database of sermons via a web request to a PHP file which issues the SQL commands. There are also PHP files for viewing lists of sermons and general administration of sermons.
Thanks to all who helped make Sermons on the Web a reality.
Sermons the Web has been a stable application used in production week in and week out since 2003.
Soon after Brookside Baptist Church began putting sermons on its web site in 2003, the need to automate the process quickly became evident. Ed quickly created a simple, stand-alone application called Sermon Upload to collect the input, encode the MP3 file, generate a static web page, and upload the MP3 file and page to the web site. The "database" was just a non-normalized XML file tied to a .NET 1.1 DataSet. After the initial version, Ed added the feature to create archives, first using MP3, later switching to WMA to optimize space.
In 2005, Jonathan and Ed added the server-side database and PHP code to support multiple views of the sermons and provide data normalization. Ed updated the publisher application to make the web requests to read and write to the database. Once this version was complete and in production, Ed began work on making Sermon Upload easier for other churches to reuse and for other developers to contribute to. He registered the project with SourceForge on September 1, 2004 under the project's new name, and the next day, published the beta of the new version, the first public release of Sermons on the Web.
Copyright 2008 Edward D. Brey. Free to redistribute and modify per the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.
