Hi Stacey,
I know I'd be interested in seeing your code since I'd like to do
something similar for photos. I'm also an assistant ward clerk and
the Bishop would like to use the online photo directory. I wonder if
i could use your script as a starting point for a script to
automatically upload all the photos since they have to done one by one.
Richard
On Jan 27, 2006, at 11:26 AM, Stacey wrote:
Hi Y'all:
I just found out about this list and recently joined so let me
introduce
myself first...
My name is Stacey and my family and I live in the great state of Texas
just north of Dallas. I have been using open source pretty much since
the 80's when I was a student and systems programmer running BSD 4.2
Tahoe on VAX 11/780's. Today, some things have not changed... I
still
use BSD (Mac OS X) on my personal laptop, Gentoo Linux on my MythTV
(Tivo-like) box, and use Linux and FreeBSD for work. So let's just
say I have been leveraging open source to make my life easier for a
long
time. I was happy to hear from a friend (Matt Probst) about this list.
I hold callings as Stake and Ward Clerks here in Texas. As part of my
assignment I keep our stake and ward web pages up to date. This
includes the calendar, leadership directories, etc. I also track the
usage and schedule our stake building which is a job in itself
given we
have four but soon to be five wards using the building, not to mention
the stake meetings that are scheduled there. In addition, I create
programs to help our stake leaders do their jobs. Our stake is very
large in both the number of wards and geography. We have 15 wards
(after Sunday this will be 16) and our stake boundaries reaches from
North of Dallas up and into Oklahoma. Therefore, I stake does not
publish a paper stake calendar nor do we publish a stake directory of
any sort. We rely totally on the Stake/Ward web sites that the church
has provided for this information. (Needless to say, we have saved a
lot of money in printing costs.)
If you have used the administrator screen on the stake/ward web site
that the Church provides you may notice it lacks some features that
would be desired. One such feature is the ability to upload a
calendar
that has been created, with say, outlook. Every year, when we do our
planning, our executive secretary creates the calendar in outlook and
then hands me the data to upload to the web site. After using the
limited input interface on the Church web site provides I decided to
create a better way. I wrote a simply perl script that uploads the
data
from a CSV file. The script acts as web client and inputs the data
into
the HTML/HTTP forms. This makes publishing a ward/stake calendar a
snap.
In addition, at the request of our stake presidency, I created
software
that allows our stake presidency, bishops, and other leaders to
download
the calendar data to their computers in iCal, vCal, or CSV formats.
This allows them to have the calendar in their palm pilots, etc. The
script is set up as a web application (perl CGI). They go to a form
that is hosted on a web site. Enter in what month they want,
which events (Ward, Stake, Churchwide), and what format they would
like
(iCal, vCal, CSV). In addition, I require them to enter their LDS.org
login information. The script uses their login information to access
the Church web site so it knows they have access permission to do
so. I
also created a similar web application for downloading ward directory
information.
I don't know how the Church office would feel about this kind of
software but would like to share the code with the folks subscribed to
this list. Be warned, I am not a perl programmer by trade and do most
of my programming in the kernel and system level. Therefore, it could
use the talents of a real perl programmer to be cleaned up a bit.
However, it works great to make my job as a stake/ward clerk
easier. I
have read on the archive of this list that the Church office doesn't
like the idea of "screen scrapers" given the risk of folks using, say,
the membership data for something like multi-level marketing campaigns
(largely an Utah thing, it seems). Therefore, if the Church doesn't
like
the idea of me distributing software that does this then I will just
keep it for myself and my local leaders to benefit from. If they
don't
care then I will make it available to the members of this list.
Please
let me know the offical word about such software. Thanks in advance.
Best Regards,
-stacey.
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