1. What does he stand for?
2. What has he done?
3. What will he do as President?

If your answer to the above consists of the words “change”, “unite” or “inspire”, your answer doesn’t count. I’ve heard all of that before. Those words have no meaning unless you include with them something specific. So please, be specific.

If you cannot answer at least 2 of those questions with something specific, either off the top of your head or after doing a little research, I think it’s time to take a serious look at exactly why you are supporting this candidate.

After several months of planning and developing, my church’s website finally went live yesterday. Last Fall, I was approached by our church’s promotions team about creating a new web presence for the church. (Someone must have told them that I design websites for a living.) At the time, the site was a bit out dated because it was difficult to maintain. It was also nothing more than a basic informational website.

Being a Joomla guy, I immediately began brainstorming ideas for improving the functionality of the site. I knew right away that I wanted to use Community Builder to build a social networking site. The great thing about building a church website is that there is already a built-in community. The website just helps to facilitate that community by providing another outlet for social interaction. In other words, I don’t have to build a community from scratch, but I just have to give the existing community a place to “hang out” on the internet.

I won’t go into all of the nerdy details of how the site was built, but I will give a list of the extensions I used:

• Template: Custom
• Components: Community Builder, Group Jive, uddeIM, sh404SEF, EventList, JoomlaXplorer
• Modules: Extended Menu, Latest Events, Group Jive Newest Groups, s4j Newest Users, Rok Slideshow

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them, and I’ll do my best to answer them. Here is a link to the site: Harris Creek Baptist Church.

If you paid attention in high school biology, you know that a woman does not stay pregnant for 18 months. You know that it is more like 9 months. A little quick math will show that it took 9 months for us to get pregnant…probably the longest 9 months of our marriage. During that time, we really had a difficult time trusting God and trusting that He has a plan for our lives that is immeasurably greater than anything we could ever imagine. In retrospect, 9 months is not a long time, and I hate that I had such a lack of faith during that time.

Another Baby

Fast forward to December, 2007. I was getting dressed one morning to go to work, and I heard my wife exclaim “This is not happening!” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I rushed to see what was the matter. She was holding in her hand a pregnancy test. Surprise! We were going to have another baby! I was excited, albeit a little shocked. We were not trying this time, but I guess we weren’t trying to prevent it either. My wife was a little less excited (thoughts of sleepless nights were rushing to her mind), but she eventually warmed up to the idea.

That weekend, we told our family and friends the great news, and they all celebrated with us. Our first doctor’s appointment came at the beginning of January without incident. We got to see the tiny little heartbeat on the ultrasound just like we had seen with Lucy.

Things changed this week. On Tuesday, we went to the doctor for a second routine visit. We knew from our experience with Lucy that the doctor would use a little machine to hear the baby’s heartbeat and check that everything was ok. He got out the little machine, but no heartbeat. He told us not to worry because sometimes you cannot hear the heartbeat this early in the pregnancy. Just to be sure, he did an ultrasound. Still nothing. Again, he told us not to be nervous because at this point he still did not know anything. Finally, he did an internal ultrasound. It was during this ultrasound that our fears were confirmed.

At some point between that first doctor’s visit and this one, for whatever reason, the baby stopped growing. The doctor was unable to find the baby where it should have been. The pregnancy had ended prematurely. Apparently this happens in 15% of pregnancies. Needless to say, my wife and I were devastated by the news. We had already begun to plan and dream of what we would do with our next baby, and we found out that we would not be having this baby.

We told our families and some close friends about what had happened, and we found ourselves surrounded with support and prayer. We will never know why this happened, but one thing we know is that ultimately God has a bigger and better plan for us than our own.

Perspective

Two of our closest friends have experienced this loss twice. They were trying to get pregnant around the same time that we were trying to get pregnant with Lucy. They got pregnant well before we did, but that first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Eventually, they started trying again, but it took a longer time this time. Not long before Lucy was born, they got pregnant again, but miscarried a second time. A month after Lucy was born, we found out that they were pregnant again. This time, their pregnancy went full term, and now they have a beautiful baby girl.

God brought them through that experience. It was a tough road, and many tears were shed, but He brought them through. Seeing their experience and being there for them through that time helped me to have perspective on how God works in these types of situations. It is for that reason that I know that He will bring us through this time, and He has a plan for our lives far greater than our own plans. I’m not saying He is going to give us another baby. I just know to trust that He is sovereign, and He knows what is best. Knowing that and trusting that gives me peace and comfort during this time, and I only hope that others can experience that same peace.

Before I talk any further about CWM, I want to take some time to thank the guys over at JoomlaShack for giving me the opportunity to do what I love professionally. You could not ask for a better group of guys to work with. This is a company that truly cares about its customers, its employees, and its contractors. Everything they do is with quality and integrity, and for that I am truly honored to have had the opportunity to work with them.

From hobby to career (a little history)

I started designing websites in my dorm room over 10 years ago as a hobby. As time went on, I started learning as much as I could about web design, and I discovered the concept of content management systems (CMS). A little over 4 years ago, I was looking for a system to redesign my company’s website, and I came across a little CMS called Mambo. I loved its simplicity and its slick administrator interface compared with what I found in other CMS’s like phpNuke and PostNuke, so I decided to give it a try.

In 2005, when the core team split from Mambo to form Open Source Matters and Joomla, I made the decision to stick with the developers and switch my company’s site to Joomla. In April of 2006, inspired by sites such as Unmatched Style and CSS Beauty, I started a little site called JoomlaForm.com to showcase what I believe are some of the best examples of well-designed websites that are powered by Joomla. Not long after that, I met Barrie North when I showcased JoomlaShack’s website at JoomlaForm. In e-mail conversations with Barrie, I found out that JoomlaShack needed an experienced Joomla designer to help them perform custom design and development work for JoomlaShack customers.

In the year-and-a-half since I started working with JoomlaShack, I have learned a tremendous amount about Joomla, web design and development, and working with clients on web projects. Through my experiences, I decided to share some of the knowledge I had gained through a new website, HowToJoomla.net starting in September of 2006. I feel honored to have helped hundreds (maybe thousands) of people learn some of the tips and tricks that I have learned.

Last fall, I really started to feel that this was my calling, to design and develop websites and share my experience and knowledge with the world. That started the idea in my mind of going out on my own and starting a web design, development and consulting company specializing in Joomla. I approached Barrie about the idea, and he has been extremely supportive during this process. I truly cannot thank him enough. He is an honorable and good man, and I am proud to call him my friend.

Yesterday marked the end of my time with JoomlaShack, and today is the beginning of Cory Webb Media! The good news is, I am already up to my eyeballs with work. The bad news is, I am pretty limited with the number of new projects I can take on at the moment. However, if you are in need of Joomla custom design, development, consultation, etc., please feel free to e-mail me at cory@corywebbmedia.com to discuss your project.

On a related note, people in the U.S. are waking up and discovering the news, and consequently the Joomla.org server is currently down. I guess I’ll just have to wait my turn to download the latest stable release.

Plus, being the nerd that I am, I wanted a chance to poke around in Wordpress and learn how to use it. Who knows? Maybe one day I will start a website HowToWordpress and share my experiences. It won’t happen any time soon though because I have a long way to go before I can teach anyone anything about Wordpress.

I hope that clears things up.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy!