St. Joseph Church

About this Web Site

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Last Updated on Monday, January 30, 2012 18:59

Welcome to our web site. My name is Rick Swenton and I am a parishioner of St. Joseph Church. If you have any comments or suggestions about our parish web sites This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . I would love to hear from you (especially our parishioners) concerning what you like or dislike about this site. What do you find valuable? What do you find useless? What is missing that we need to add in the future? Your opinion is always welcome. All messages will be promptly acknowledged. Thanks for visiting our site!
- Rick

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Joomla is a content-management system (CMS) and is licensed under Version 2 or later of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Some current users of Joomla include MTV Networks Quizilla, IHOP, Harvard
University and Citibank.

The St. Joseph Church collection of web sites includes individual sites for the Church (including the Cemetery), School, Music Ministry (Internal) and the Hartford Chapter, National Association of Pastoral Musicians.  We also have a parish Blog running Wordpress.

Site Updates:

[01/29/2012] - Upgraded all four instances to Joomla 2.5.  The upgrade was smooth and without issue.

[10/05/2011] - Upgraded to Joomla 1.7.1.  Everything nominal.  Various fine tuning and module configurations performed. Input from users helped me to daignose some PDF pages displaying improperly.  Thanks!

[08/09/2011] - The fine-tuning of the upgrade to Joomla 1.7 is complete.  Everything seems to be working well.  There could still be a broken link or two so please bring these to my attention and I will fix them.

[08/03/2011] - Upgraded to Joomla 1.7 which was a major operation.  It required many structural and configuration changes.  Please let me know if you experience any problems.

[11/16/2010] - Upgraded to the latest release 1.5.22 of Joomla.  Modified the slide show Module on the school site to support more than one instance of the slide show on the same page.

09/21/2010 - Upgraded to the latest release 1.5.21 of Joomla.

[07/23/2010] - Upgraded  to the latest release 1.5.20 of Joomla.  Anxiously awaiting version 1.6 which is due to be released late this summer.  Earlier tihs year I integrated Google Analytics with the parish web sites.  It's interesting to review the available data about where visitors are coming from and what pages they are viewing.

[07/01/2010] - Added the Online Giving information to provide visitors to regsiter and begin their online contributions to the parish.

[05/29/2010] - Upgraded to the latest release 1.5.18 of Joomla to address security vulnerabilities.  All parish web sites updated and performing nominally.

[08/08/2009] - Upgraded to the latest release 1.5.14 of Joomla.  Added support for smartphones.  You can now go to http://m.stjosephbristol.org for the church site and http://m.school.stjosephbristol.org for the school site on your mobile phone.

[07/21/2009] - Upgraded all web sites to version 1.5.13 of Joomla to address security vulnerabilities.  All parish web sites updated and performing nominally.

[07/01/2009] - Upgraded to the latest release 1.5.12 of Joomla.  The parish school web site has been gaining popularity and functionality over the past few years.  We're getting ready to implement new features for the upcoming year.

[04/10/2009] - The Joomla developers were at it again and released version 1.5.10 to address security vulnerabilities.  All parish web sites updated and performing nominally.

[02/14/2009] - Upgraded all web sites to the latest production version 1.5.9 of Joomla. All sites running nominally. Nice to see the Joomla development team keeping up with the security updates and enhancements!

[12/28/2008] - Upgraded all web sites to the latest production version 1.5.8 of Joomla. All sites running nominally.

[10/22/2008] - Upgraded to the latest production version 1.5.7 of Joomla. All parish web sites continue to perform well and without incident. Frequently updated document resources on the church and school web sites (such as Pastoral Council and Home & School Association minutes) are now simple directory displays of the available files. Converted the private music ministry address book to a new format.

[08/24/2008] - Upgraded to the latest production version 1.5.6 of Joomla. This fixed all the known security issues. I also modified all the custom PHP scripts in the Music Ministry Members section to allow the code to work with register-globals off. No new exploits were experienced since June.

[06/22/2008] - This weekend I upgraded the Parish web sites to the latest production version 1.5.3 of Joomla. Our site was recently compromised with a Javascript exploit that redirected users to a Russian search site. All domains were impacted. Almost a thousand files were infected with the exploit. I am still investigating the method of injection. Please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you find any problems or if you experience that Russian redirect.

[03/30/2008] - This past weekend our hosting provider relocated our server to a new data center in a new city. Since the move was disruptive I decided to take advantage of the outage and request an upgrade to the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. For this upgrade I had to backup all files and databases on all domains and restore them on the new server. I was doing this while DNS was updating the new IP addresses so it was a good use of the downtime. Most everything is running now and only a few low impact directories are pending restoration. Please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you find any problems and thanks!

[01/28/2008] - This past week I updated all the Parish web sites to the production version of Joomla 1.5. We started running Joomla 1.5 Beta versions and advanced all the way through the release candidates. It was very risky to run our web sites in production mode with beta software but I decided to take the chance. It was a good decision.

Some areas that get frequent file additions are now running a PHP directory display. You will see this on pages such as the Parish Bulletin and the School Weekly Communications. This way I can just drop those files in their respective directories and they automatically appear on the web site.

I also configured and enabled PDF file generation which will be available on most pages with a small icon next to the ones for Print and E-Mail on each article.

[07/02/2007] - I have migrated the old parish and school web sites to an open source content management system called Joomla. It is a complete web site system that runs on the server at the hosting provider. It uses the LAMP Stack - Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP. You will see automated features on the new site not previously available.

[04/29/2007] - Today we moved our parish web pages from RCNet hosted and residential service ISP hosted pages to a dedicated server. We are grateful for the ten years of free hosting provided to us by RCNet. This gives us the opportunity to pursue server side scripting and PHP / MySQL (which is already in place on the Music Ministry internal portal.)

[03/07/2007] - This coming July 2007 we will be celebrating our 10th year online with this parish web site. While our message reaches all over the world it is difficult to measure our local impact. One definite positive impact is the number of new parishioners and school families that came to our parish and school because of visiting our web sites. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you are interested in helping out with administering our parish web sites or are interested in submitting materials for publication.

[02/17/2005] - The parish bulletin is updated weekly and available online. We have modified the method of delivery because we are now receiving the bulletin electronically. The bulletin for the coming weekend is usually posted by Wednesday along with our pastor's weekly message.

One final note, I had to abandon our guestbook. Spammers and other creative people incessantly hammered the guestbook with automated entries trying to sell all kinds of things. It was unfortunate that this feature had to be eliminated. For each legitimate entry there were hundreds of spam entries.

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