I would just like to take a moment to thank all of the people in the world that made this site possible. This site is driven by you! I have used open source programs to build this site and it has resulted in a very robust and usable site for the United Church of Christ, Congregational in Medina, OH.

I am going to provide links to all of your tools. If you see something I missed, Please, do not hesitate to contact me and let me know. I will link you to this site.

If you are here from another church and thinking about getting your organization online you could do a lot worse than open source. The cost of this site would be thousands of dollars without it. Just the developement tools would cost that.

And All The Credit Goes To

• GNU Project - A Unix-like operating system that uses the Linux Kernel. They are why we have a "Free Operating System"
• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute modified computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free software, particularly the GNU operating system, used widely in its GNU/Linux variant.
• Free BSD - The operating system this site is running on. The operating system is being hosted by HostMonster
• MySQL - A lot of our applications require a database. We use MySQL for that. MySQL is a very robust and secure database.
• WordPress - This is a blog. If your information is changing requently, and you don't want your webmaster to be responsible for making the changes, WordPress may be an option for you. It is very easy for the end user to update once it is setup and configured. We use this for the Pilgrim Messenger, a weekly distribution, and Messages From the Pasto.
• k5n.us (Web Calendar - A fantastic web calendar. You can have multiple groups and users update their own portion of the calender and the users can filter based on the group they would like to see, or view all the events at once.
• Coppermine Photo Gallery - A photo gallery for the web that is just plain hard, if not impossible, to beat. There are so many features and different functions that you will find yourself only using a portion of this application if you are just running a photo gallery to show what your organization is doing. Each group can have their own category and there can be tons of albumns within those categories. Very easy for the managers of the photos to upload and put descriptions on the pictures
• Dada Mail - A list distribution software for mailing weekly or daily information to your members. Your host provider will thank you for using this. If you are limited to processor and memory usage it may be in your best interest to look into this to keep from getting your service suspended for a period of time if you have huge lists
• PmWiki - This wiki is used for documentation and colaboration between the web committee. This is an easy to use and security is available.
• Javascript-FX - A java script that was written by the person that runs this site, I think, that keeps my users one click away from home. This is a wonderful script.
• PCLinuxOS - This is what I am using for an operating system right now. That could change. With GNU you have so many options that it is hard to choose. I've used Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse and Mandriva. I have gotten my wireless to work with all of them but it seems that PCLinuxOS is about the easiest one to get running right now. It also has most of the tools I use loaded in the default distribution.
• Gimp - An image manipulation program that has a lot in common with PhotoShop, except the price. Try it, once you figure it out you won't go back.
• Bluefish - I use Bluefish for all of my html, css and php development. It's great. As long as you can code and don't need WYSIWYG this is great.
• OpenClipart - I used clipart from this site for this site. They have some great images here and they are free to use.
• Christian Clipart - I also used clipart from this site.
• Other Java Scripts - I got my menu from this site. They have a ton of java scripts and css solutions. Just reference them in your site. Good stuff.
• VideoLan - I have been working on streaming the services for the people who cannot make it to the services from illness or whatever and people interested in our church. This is a great tool for this.