Even more interesting (to me) then the article are the comments — almost 90% negative about the use of new technology in the church. You can read the article and comments here.

What do you make of it?

*Nod to Guy Kawasaki

What you will find in this ongoing series are my observations and ideas about both rapid development frameworks and why one might use them. I will be completely subjective and if you need more information you can always contact the different projects themselves. The point of this will be a perspective that is not geeky, but might help project managers and team leaders make development platform decisions.

As a developer (yes, I know I just contradicted myself) I MUST find things that make my life easier. As a designer, I need to know what tools I have available to me. I was teaching a class the other day to a bunch of high school students about CSS and standards based design. In the class I let them know that you can no longer be a designer without knowing what the tools are and how they work. I am constantly playing and learning.

When Ruby on Rails came out I was excited. Then I tried to install it. Ouch. This is not a hobby for me, so if I cannot start playing and seeing the benefit quickly chances are I won’t be back. In the meantime I stayed with PHP and got everything out of WordPress that I could.

But the last few years have started to change the game. Now EVERYONE has an API and sites need to contribute to the collaborative environment of the web. And this calls for a more robust platform for developing website. And to be honest, the projects I am working on now are not really websites, but are online applications.

Around the time that the needs of my clients and projects started to ramp up I was told about Django. I was told that Django is the Python version of Rails. I was familiar with CakePHP, one of the PHP answers to Rails. I found the support for Cake pretty arrogant and not very helpful. However, that may have changed in the last year.

Rails seemed like the hot framework, so I decided I need to learn Rails. I got Rails installed finally. Thank you Paul Sturgess!. Not so bad this time. I bought a book and got started. It was actually fun. Development has always been a considered and serious endeavor for me. But Rails and this book made it fun. All of a sudden I had all kids of new ideas. Ideas were giving birth to new ideas. It was exciting.

But then someone showed me the admin for Django. I was stopped in my tracks. What I was looking at was a beautiful, flexible and powerful UI that would use your setup to control your content. It was wonderful. Where is this feature in Rails? It doesn’t exist.

So, I started playing with Django.

Loved it. Similar reaction. Excited about projects, excited about possibilities. But now I ALSO had a proof of concept. Once I got my database structure setup, I was rocking and rolling. I could show the concept to someone, or launch an admin and let the team start adding content while I continued with the design and functionality.

For me… for now… Django is an awesome solution for building an app. I can build a real solution, with real features in darn near real time.

More coming soon.

In the meantime, check out this video.

Ask your questions in the comments.

From their site: “Nexo is a free service that allows groups to collaborate online. Groups can share interactive calendars, pictures, videos, tasks, polls, comments, blogs, files and much more. Nexo is free, flexible and secure.”

It’s easiest to call Nexo a Myspace for groups, but it looks better than Myspace and has a more intuitive feel. Nexo prides themselves on being easy to use, so easy a caveman could use it (wait, that’s another company completely) - so easy to use a 72-year old mother could use it and want to use it.

For a quick and quirky overview of what they offer, watch this video.

I’ve begun implementing this site with a few of our Life Groups (Bible Studies). My field test has yielded no results at the moment, but I’m anxious to see what kind of adoption rate and usage these sites will receive.

Nexo only launched at the beginning of this year, so they are a newcomer, but their product looks fairly polished. It’s free and ad-free for the time being, but I emailed the company to get a few answers that were not readily available on their website.

1. It will remain free but will become ad-supported in the Fall. There will be an option to pay $14.95/month per group to remove the ads. For some church members, ads could be a turn-off, especially depending on what types of ads they are.

2. I inquired about groups within groups, so our church could be a group and each Life Group would belong to the larger group. They’ve received many requests about just such a feature, so it might be in the works.

3. Storage: Your group has 1 GB for free to use for uploads, whether that be pictures or documents. Additional storage is $9.95/month for 5 GB more.

4. They are investigating different pricing for non-profits and multiple groups within the same group (i.e. many Bible Studies from the same church). If you look at the site and like what they have to offer for your church, I recommend that you email the company and ask about special pricing for non-profits. More voices equals a better chance for better pricing for what could be a very valuable service.

Have any readers heard of Nexo or have used their service? What are your initial thoughts on what they offer in regards to how we can best use it within the church?