I’m really excited to announce the latest web project I’ve been working on with the IMB’s Sub-Saharan Africa media team. AfricaStories is a new web site they’ve launched that features multimedia stories about God’s work across the continent. The purpose of the project is not only to inform readers (you!) about the needs and struggles of faced by those in Africa, but to motivate you to become engaged yourself.
I really hope you take the time to read the stories, browse the photographs, and watch the videos on AfricaStories.org. Please help spread the word by sharing the site with your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and whatever people still using MySpace are called.
The media team has some incredibly talented writers, photographers, and videographers that have contributed content for the first 5 “story packages” we launched with. The site will continue to be updated with new stories on a regular basis (subscribe for updates!).
My contribution to the project was creating the website that delivers the content. I used WordPress as the content-management system it runs on and made quite a few customizations using jQuery. Most people think of WordPress as mere blogging software, but it is quite flexible. In fact, in this implementation I completely removed the blog “posts” feature and just use the “pages”.
The main jQuery plugins I used are jQuery TOOLS and ColorBox. This was my first big leap into the world of this Javascript platform and I was really impressed with its ease-of-use and the community supporting it. What I would have created with Flash in the past, I am now able to pull off with Javascript and still have great cross-browser compatibility.
