Last week marked the official launch of the Center for Mennonite Writing site. This is an especially exciting moment for me because, to date, this is my largest and most complex Web project. For some background on the idea behind the site, you can read a press release issued by Goshen College and subsequently picked up by the Mennonite Weekly Review.
The CMW site began its life as a Drupal-based site in the summer of 2007. At the time I was working on the project as part of a summer research program called Maple Scholars. This was my first experience developing a database-driven Web 2.0 site and my first real effort to learn PHP.
In addition to the technological aspect, I was also responsible for working out the structure of the site. I worked closely with Kyle Schlabach and Ann Hostetler, both professors in the Goshen College English department, to design a site that would serve as a space for publishing, criticism, reference, announcements, and community interaction. In the end, we settled on a three-pronged structure that became the CMW Journal, CMW Encyclopedia, and CMW Community.
In the design of the site, I wanted to reference Mennonite identity without confining it to a particular expression. I spent time in Goshen’s Mennonite Historical Library researching traditional Mennonite arts, especially a decorative art form called fraktur. One image in particular, the bookplate of a 1708 Froschauer Bible, stood out to me, and I decided to use it as the basis for the home page design.
For the site’s logo, I turned for inspiration to an image known as the Anabaptist digger. The image first appeared in the Martyr’s Mirror along with the words “work and hope.” This, it seemed to me, was an appropriate slogan for an emerging art like Mennonite writing. I abstracted the Anabaptist digger for use in the CMW logo as well as the logos of the three sub-sites. (For more on the design considerations that played into the CMW, see my final paper for the Maple Scholars project.)
By August of 2007, I had developed a working prototype for the site. It was still incomplete, to be sure, but it served as a proof of concept to attract writers and donors to the project. At this point, I turned the project over to Kyle and Ann while I left for a three-month cross-cultural term in Peru.
When I returned from Peru, I began working on the CMW site part-time as my coursework allowed. As I continued to develop the project, though, I had the growing sense that Drupal was no longer the best tool for the job. For one thing, its concept of “nodes” made it difficult to create the issue-article relationships that the CMW Journal required. For another, it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the three sub-themes without a lot of duplication.
In the fall of 2008, I began an independent study learning the Python-based framework Django. My first project was developing this site for my own use, but when that was finished, I needed another project to complete my required hours. I decided to begin working on a rewrite of the CMW site using the Django framework. The result of that effort is now visible as the newly-launched Center for Mennonite Writing.
Though “launched,” the CMW project is not complete in the sense of a finished product. Among other things, I have plans to add additional features and content types to the Encyclopedia and Community sections of the site. I also want to refine the comment and tagging systems to better integrate them with the rest of the site and develop a module for easy multimedia uploading. And of course, even as I write, more content is on the way.
For now, though, it is satisfying to see something to which I have devoted so much time and energy finally taking on a life of its own.
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