Thread

We just launched a campaign website called JESUS IS ___.—inviting visitors to fill in the blank.

http://jesus-is.org

It was fun to build, and is my first EE 2.1 site in the wild. So far the response has been great—just under 5000 submissions in a week, with over 17k visitors and almost 140k pageviews!

Besides the obvious campaign goals, I had a few goals of my own that were more technical in nature. I wanted:

1. Single entry pages to exist at the root level in the URL (e.g. /entry_title)
2. Guests to be able to submit without logging in or requiring information
3. To be able to easily moderate the site from outside the Control Panel
4. Entries to have the flexibility of being customized (with colors or a background image), but fallback gracefully with an engaging design (randomized color scheme)
5. To match the campaign typography design as close as possible, but remain dynamic.

I was able to accomplish the first goal using the .htaccess mod for removing index.php from the URL, and by segment conditionals in the index template.

For submissions, we’re using the new SafeCracker Beta add-on. It works like a charm (though we’ve seen a significant increase in our server CPU usage by mysqld).

For the other goals, I utilized a number of different add-ons and scripts. Credit where its due:

- LikEE—for the agree/disagree buttons
- MD Color Picker—for easy color picking in the Control Panel
- DataGrab—helps keep our ‘projects’ in sync with our internal app, as well as import tweets
- REST—works great, but don’t count on support
- ImageSizer—indispensable

And then there’s the non-EE stuff:

- TypeKit (League Gothic font)
- 960gs
- jQuery
- Shaun Inman’s file field script
- Vertical Align jQuery plugin

There’s still a lot of tweaking to be done, not the least of which is figuring out how to get infinite scroll working on the /all page. (I’ve got it working in every browser but IE, go figure.)

I’d appreciate friendly critique and suggestions while I continue to tweak. Thanks!

G’day Sean, beautiful site, congrats on the launch.

To give you some hopefully constructive feedback - I had issues figuring out what to do here:

http://jesus-is.org/create

First thing I did was click on the logo, because that’s where the blank was…

Then I went back and paused for a while, and clicked on the “options” button as I didn’t realise the instruction “fill in the blank” was actually the input field 😊

I’d suggest putting the label above the input field, and (dare I say) an animated gif with a cursor flashing (C64 style) in the input which disappears on focus/active.

Anyhoo, top work and congrats.

Great on simplicity and design. I’m developing a SAEF site as well using SafeCracker.

With javascript disabled my submission still went through. It would be great if there was backend validation built in with SafeCracker.

I am wondering how to achieve point 1. I have not idea how to do it, so if you don’t mind and share, it would be great, but if you not, it is not the end of the world.

btw. amazing site. Great idea. Love it.

I am wondering how to achieve point 1. I have not idea how to do it, so if you don’t mind and share, it would be great, but if you not, it is not the end of the world.

btw. amazing site. Great idea. Love it.

In a nut, in your index template:

{if segment_1 == ''}
{embed="home"}
{if:elseif segment_1 == '[other_template_name(s)_here]'}
{embed="[other_template_name]"}
{if:else}
{embed="single_entry_page"}
{/if}

Hope that helps.

Thank you a lot!

Nicely done.

Very cool, great work. I love the typography and simplicity.