Josh Young

We’re back from CIY and now in the midst of VBS (it’s like the month of acronyms or something).

CIY was amazing. It was great to get to know some of our high schoolers more and to see them grow throughout the week. We have some great kids at ACC.

Marie and I also got a lot out of the week aside from the kids. The whole conference was just a great experience (just as I remember it being when I was in high school myself).

One thing that was amazing to me (and yet not surprising) was the way technology has shaped what we do at these things in the last 10 years. The amount of audio, video, lighting, etc. that was used there was staggering. It’s amazing the resources that we have now that we could have only dreamed of 10 years ago. CIY did a great job of marrying everything together to produce some amazing worship experiences. They were able to use these tools to engage a very large group of otherwise distracted and media blitzed teenagers.

Along that line, one of the electives I attended was called “Backstage Pass and Production Principles,” and it was basically a tour of the whole stage setup (back and front of house) and Q&A session with the Production Manager, Josh Maichele. Josh was very impressive. He took any and all questions, and he was a great resource to all of us there. He ran a killer production, and he was extremely nice. It was great to ask him specific questions about how they do what they do, and to see up-close all of the equipment and props they were using.

I’ll post more later on the week. I’m also working on some videos from it all, and I’ll post them once I get them finished.

CIY

Luminous Student Ministries

Our new student ministries website is officially live starting today. You can visit it at www.ameliastudents.com.

We’ve worked really hard to make it a safe and fun place for our students and their friends. You’ll probably see some changes with it over the next several months as we tweak it to be even more centered on the needs of our students.

On the tech side of things, I built the site using WordPress 2.0.7 (there are some conflicts with 2.1 and the polls plugin that we’re using) with a custom widgetized template that I designed. I also integrated Vanilla 1.0.3 (forum) into the design.

Here is a list of WordPress plugins we’re using on the site:

• About Me Widget
• Akismet
• Angsuman’s Referrer Bouncer
• Auto-hyperlink URLs
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
• Email Shroud
• FD Feedburner Plugin
• Google Analyticator (gotta love those stats)
• Google Sitemaps
• Image Manager
• Page Links To
• Polite-ifier
• Search Pages
• Sidebar Widgets
• WP-ContactForm
• WP-Polls
• WP-Polls Widget

Here is a list of Vanilla extensions we’re using on the site:

• Account Pictures 1.1
• Announcement 1.2
• Applicant E-mail Verification 0.4.0
• BBInsert Bar 0.1.5
• Better BB Code 1.0
• Discussion Filters 2.0
• Extended Text Formatter 1.0
• Guest Welcome Message 1.0
• Hide Success 1.0
• Invite Friends 0.3
• Legends 1.0
• MarkAllRead 1.0
• New Applicants 1
• NewsMailer 0.2
• Predefined Attributes 0.3.3
• Private Accounts 1.0
• Role History 1.0
• STOP CAPS ABUSE 1.0
• Saved Searches 2.0
• Smooth Page Jump 1.0
• Yellow Fade Effect 0.1
• Comments Permalinks 1.0

For the games on the site, we’re using code from a free Miniclip.com game each month. Watch out, the game I have up as Last Month’s Game is really addicting!

Luminous Student Ministries - ameliastudents.com

Wordpress

Vanilla

Miniclip.com