Discovery Community Church was a church plant in Troutdale, Oregon. It officially "launched" February 2nd, 2003. It's final service was March 6, 2005.


Initial Design
I have been involved with Discovery from the beginning and did several designs of their website, along with maintenance. My initial design was an expansion of a design and ideas from Mike Branch. I took the template he had developed and slimmed it down, removing unneeded code and making it easier to edit. Also as part of the initial design, I developed flash based websites for Paradigm (young adults ministry), DYVE (youth group), and Promiseland Kids, all of which were ministries of Discovery. Most of the initial design was done August 2002.

After the initial design, my responsibilities became primarily keeping the website updated. This involved linking to MP3s of the sermons when the audio team had finished with them and converting promotional materials from the graphic design team for web use. I also experimented with several features of the site and developed a set of forums, among other things.


RE-Design
After two years of maintaining the site, several problems and issues with the original design became apparent. To edit the site involved digging through the HTML files to find the spot that needed edited. This meant that I was forced to do any edits or tweaks to the content of the site. Every week a new MP3 had to be linked to. The design of the site had become cluttered and dated, so we decided to redesign it with flash. We also wanted to provide an alternative low bandwidth site for dialup users.

Taking these issues into account, I redesigned the site in flash. Because of both the issues with updating and wanting to provide a low bandwidth alternative, I choose to separate the content of the site from the design. Each of the pages of the site had a content file. These files contain the text of the page and various HTML formatting tags. A PHP script fetches the file and tweaks the formatting, then passes the content back to either the low bandwidth website or the flash website. This way the content is centralized and can be easily edited.

Technical Issues
While the concept of the preceding design sounds good and the newer versions of Flash support several HTML tags, the only version of Flash the I had was Flash 4 and there wasn't much of a budget for the website. In order to take advantage of these newer features, I turned to open source tools. Ming is a C library for compiling ActionScript into swf files. While ActionScript is all I really needed for the actual text box, it would have been difficult to do any extensive graphical work.

Working with these tools, I separated the design into multiple SWF files. Most files were built in Flash 4 and were graphical. The dynamic text box was coded in ActionScript and compiled with PHP and Ming. This allowed it to use features of Flash MX (6). Because the base movie determines what version the player behaves as, the lowest layer that loads the other swf movies also had to be built with ActionScript and Ming. For more information see Layers 0 and 4 in the following presentation. Having the movies separated proved to be useful in updating the flash content. Also having the page content separate allowed other people to edit it. Because of the infrastructure, I was able to write a script that would update the site when a new sermon had ben uploaded. All in all the redesign allowed for several useful additions to the website.


The Discovery website was a learning experience during the almost three years I was involved with it. My skills with Flash, PHP, HTML and CSS were greatly developed and tested throughout the life of the project. All of the websites I have done since then, including the site you are looking at, have drawn upon the experience gained in doing Discovery's site.