ALPS on Adventist Church Connect

This last week I spend two days with a group of communicators and developers working on Adventist Church Connect (ACC). ACC provides church websites for the North American Division (NAD) to every church that wants one. The project is sponsored by the NAD and run by AdventSource using technology licensed from SimpleUpdates.

The meeting was in Lincoln, Nebraska, and brought together developers from SimpleUpdates, project and support managers from AdventistSource, as well as power-users and representatives from the North America to talk about the future of the product.

At the meeting, we got to see a demo of SimpleUpdates 2016, the next version of the software.  There are some slick new features coming, including drag-and-drop uploading of images, in-place text editing, and a powerful media manager! (You can watch a demo video here.)

What about ALPS?

Over the last few months as we have worked on ALPS, we have talked about what we are doing very publicly, but this was the first time I got to show the Adventist Living Pattern System to a broader group of people. And the response was great!

The North American Division and AdventSource will be building templates based on the ALPS code for Adventist Church Connect, and by the end of the year, it will be made available to churches. While may of the details are yet to be worked out, we will be providing several options for structuring pages on both the simple sites (1.0), as well as the more complex sites (2.0 and 3.0).

And as expected, there are a few patterns that we won’t have at launch, but will be needed for ACC. The code for this will get contributed back into ALPS for all to use. (Calendars, anyone?)

It was my first time meeting with the people behind Adventist Church Connect, and I was very impressed by the passion and commitment of everyone to deliver the best product possible for every church in North America.