Youth dot Gospel Contenders dot Net
Gospel Contenders is an upstart online youth ministry by David Joly. As a youth leader himself, David realized that youth these days are online more than ever. Popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, can be an excellent tool to keep youth ministry leaders connected with their youth outside of regular meetings. David however, wanting to network entire youth groups, found Facebook to be inadequate. He envisioned a private, invitation-only, network that was fully open on the inside.
Not one to back down from a challenge, David developed a solution himself. Using the Zend Framework and MySQL server-side and jQuery client-side, David crafted a modern Ajax web application.
Although the website is closed to the public, we have made a number of features available for you to view in the following gallery. These images were taken during beta testing. (CAUTION: All images are full-sized screenshots. Some scrolling may be required.) If you are in need of a similar web application, get started today!
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- User's Home Page
This is user's home page. This is where everyone will spend most of their time as they read up on their friends' and group's status updates. Here users also have quick access to all youth groups on the network and devotions posted by group youth leaders.
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- User Profile Page
Each user has their own page, where they can make posts, receive posts, share photos and other media, and display some information about themselves.
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- Photo Manager
Each member has media pages where they can share photos, videos, and music. The user can share media with friends via a post attachment interface. Friends can leave comments to media via the site's comment system.
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- Message Composer
The website includes a message system that is very similar to that used by Facebook. Users can select multiple friends and fellow group members to message, all with the aid of a handy auto-complete feature.
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- Admin Dashboard
Site administrators have full access to the administrator system. Here they can select to manage groups individually, or manage from a higher level. All features from the dashboard are made possible by an Ajax-powered interface.
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- Admin Group Manager
Group leaders have access to the administration system's group manager. Here they can add youth and additional leaders, moderate posts, comments, and media, discipline unruly youth by locking their accounts, and manage the group's profile. All this is done from one page via an Ajax user interface. And, as you can see, these web forms are fully-validated, popping up error messages when needed.
