flocknote

I don't know yet whether I'll be able to attend this year's Catholic New Media Celebration, which is being held on October 19, 2013 in Boston, MA. If I can't make it, it will be the first time since CNMC 2009 (San Antonio, TX — where I met this guy) that I'm not in attendance (and the first time since 2010 that I haven't presented at the conference!), but even so, I'll be watching from afar and praying for those who are able to attend and continue spreading the seeds of faith on the fertile (but rocky) ground of the Internet!

In 2011, I left my job as the web developer for the Archdiocese of St. Louis to join Flocknote, and help build Flocknote into a great communications tool for churches, ministries, teams and organizations.

Since a few people who missed last night's St. Louis Drupal meetup wanted to hear more about Migrate module and my notes from a recent content migration for flockNote, I thought I'd post my observations and some tips here.

Migrate Module, v2

My prior experience with Migrate was on version 1.x, along with Table Wizard, for Drupal 6 (I used it in tandem with a bunch of CSV files that were used to import organizational data into the Archdiocese of St. Louis' website). A lot has changed in the process of Migrate upgrading from 1.x to 2.x... especially with Drupal 7!

Lest I forget to mention it, flockNote's 'version 3' website has been launched as of Wednesday afternoon! I spent many (if not most) of my waking hours working on the website and hundreds of features contained within, and after a couple days up and running, the website's still going like a champ!

Excellent home page design by Matthew Warner.

The site is built entirely on top of Drupal 7, and over the past three months, I've grown to appreciate Drupal many times more, as I've learned so much more about the deep and thorough APIs—bugs and all—that have developed into an extremely solid, reliable, and capable framework that is Drupal 7.x. Heck, I even dream about Drupal these days!

Since the announcements seem to be making the rounds today, I figured it would be a good time to post this little bit of news to my blog: I'm leaving my position in the Archdiocese of St. Louis to pursue another opportunity!

Starting May 2, I'll be working with a great new team of Catholics for flockNote, a service/website for Catholic parishes and organizations to help register individuals and send them, well, "Notes!"

I've been working for the Archdiocese of St. Louis for almost three years, first in the Catholic Youth Apostolate, and for the last year as the Director of Web Development, and it's been a wonderful experience. I'd like to sincerely thank everyone in the Curia of the Archdiocese of St. Louis for some great professional development, wonderful memories, and for being in a very wonderful and Catholic workplace (we had Mass in the building almost every day that I was working there!).