iMinistries

Company: iMinistries Project website: http://www.iministries.org Industry: Technology and Software Products used: RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX

We offer an easy way for you to create and maintain a superior website by giving you powerful online tools for a low monthly fee. Our content management system is specifically designed for churches and ministries and offers uparalleled design flexibility. Our integrated features give you the ability to create a user–friendly experience that will increase visitor interaction and drive repeat visits to your site.

We sought to provide a web content management system which was flexible enough to meet the needs of very large churches yet approachable enough for churches everywhere.

In the end, we wanted to give our customers the ability to create well–designed sites that were easy to maintain. The hope, of course, is that these same sites would drive repeat visits and give our customers the ability to communicate their message broadly.

At first Telerik's RadControl library seemed a good fit, if only for the two tools we needed at right away: RadEditor and RadMenu.

RadEditor provided the familiar user interface we wanted to provide for our customers. By using RadEditor, we could offer rich formatting capabilities with little–to–no training while we could control which functions were offered. We were deliberate in picking a vendor who we perceived had strong customer support, as we expected to have some unique integration needs down the road. We have not been disappointed by Telerik.

RadMenu provides the cross–browser pretty menus that we needed. It provides an easy means to customize the position and flow of the menus.

Since buying the Telerik RadControls suite, we have implemented the majority of included controls. We use the RadTreeView to help our customers interactively build their site map, their small group ministry hierarchy. We use the RadTabStrip on most editor to help simplify the editing process. We use RadUpload as the backbone of our Photo Galleries and to help customers upload large files for Podcasts. We use RadChart to give our customers a real–time view of their site usage. We've begun to use RadCallback to provide some simple AJAX functionality for a more interactive feel.

The entire solution was developed by a single developer. The first release, including the integration of RadEditor and RadMenu was developed in less than 4 months and included a number of content management features. It has been ~2 years since that first release and in the meantime, our one developer has built over 150 pages. RadMenu is part of our overloaded Page Object and is included on every page. RadEditor is included in ~25 pages throughout the site. RadTabStrip is included in ~10 pages. RadTreeView is included in ~5 pages. RadCallback is included in ~5 pages.

One interesting note is that all of our customer's websites run in the same application and use the exact same code–base. A single SQL Server provides the back–end with ~100 tables and ~250 stored procedures. This makes maintenance very easy and allows us to leverage the collective weight of all the ministries to provide great features no single ministry could afford to develop alone.

We're always excited to see what Telerik will provide next. We've come to rely on their innovation and have been surprised by the ease with which their products integrate. We like to keep our product one step ahead of our customers. Telerik always seems to be one step ahead of us.