The Evangelical Covenant Church is a rapidly growing denomination with ministries in five continents. With over 125,000 hits per month, the website for the Evangelical Covenant Church of Chicago, Il serves a vast and enthusiastic denomination.

When church staff first recognized the need to upgrade their traditional website to a content management system, they began a long search for a system that could deliver stability, support, and growth. In the second stage of their research, the staff seriously considered the enthusiasm and growth of the open source community. After months of deliberating and comparing content management systems, the church chose WebGUI. Heidi Griepp at the Evangelical Covenant Church said that they liked WebGUI and Plain Black because, while it allowed them to save money by developing the site themselves, support was available when the need arose. She also appreciates WebGUI’s holistic nature. While WebGUI continues to evolve, it is developed with the big picture in mind. There is a systematic logic involved that maintains its effectiveness.

JT, creator of WebGUI, was recently interviewed by Perlcast and that interview is now available through the iTunes music store and on perlcast.com. If you want to learn more about where WebGUI came from, what it is, and what's in WebGUI 7, then we encourage you to take a listen.

Submission by Roy Johnson

Plainblack Corporation, makers of the WebGUI Content Management System announced today the recognition of their third featured contributor as part of the People Behind WebGUI campaign. The People Behind WebGUI campaign is intended to raise community awareness about WebGUI and the people who's dedication have made it what it is today.

Submission by Roy Johnson

To recognize the hard work, dedication, and talent of the WebGUI Community, Plainblack will be featuring members of the community on the
webgui.org homepage. In addition, we will also be doing a news release every time a new member is recognized. The combined average page views of these two pages is about 15,000 per day. In addition to this, the news articles are proxied to every default WebGUI installation on the planet.

Submission by Plain Black
 Plain Black is proud to announce the release of the WebGUI Runtime Environment (WRE), a compilation of all the WebGUI prerequisites into a simple preconfigured package for unix-style distributions such as Linux, Mac OSX, BSD, and traditional Unicies. In addition, it provides many useful utilities for administering your WebGUI sites, as well as several performance enhancements over other types of installs. In short, the WRE helps you get WebGUI up and running faster, and keep it running better.
It includes all of WebGUI's prerequisites:

• Apache
• mod_perl
• MySQL
• Perl
• Image Magick
• Required Perl Modules

It also includes these features to make managing WebGUI easier:

• Site Add/Remove Scripts
• Web Site Statistics (AWStats)
• Web Site Encryption (OpenSSL)
• Log Rotation
• WebGUI Update (automatically upgrade WebGUI)

And these performance enhancements to make WebGUI faster and more reliable:

• HTTP Data Stream Compression (mod_deflate)
• Reverse Proxy (mod_proxy)
• Process Size Monitoring (Apache2::SizeLimit)
• Pretuned Apache Configuration
• Pretuned MySQL Configuration

Get it here. Learn more here.

Submission by Plain Black
 
Due to popular demand, there will be two WebGUI User's Conferences in 2005, one in Europe and one in the United States. More information about both conferences can be found here.

2005 American WebGUI User's Conference
A three-day WebGUI User's Conference will be held in Las Vegas, October 5th through the 7th. There will be almost a dozen trainers present including many of the big names from the WebGUI community. This is your best chance to get training from the sharpest minds in the WebGUI world. The conference will consist of lecture-style classes as well as hands-on workshops, town-hall meetings, and birds of a feather sessions. This will be divided into three seperate tracks: Administrators, Builders, and Developers. We'll also be opening up some of our conference space so that members of the WebGUI community can hold their own seminars and meetings on very specialized topics. If you live in the western hemisphere, this is your best chance to be trained by the experts, socialize with the other members of the WebGUI community, and have a lot of fun doing both. And if you register before July 1, you'll get a special early bird discount.

2005 European WebGUI User's Conference
A two-day WebGUI User's Conference will be held in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, November 2nd and 3rd. Held in the city center of Amsterdam, all the big names of WebGUI will be present. They will offer a programme in which users can learn about WebGUI's new features and strengthen their abilties in lectures, masterclasses and workshops. Users can submit difficult questions before the conference. Our WebGUI guru's will select the most interesting questions and demonstrate a solution in small sessions. Developpers and administrators will meet their peers and learn about the specifics of WebGUI hosting, the new API and many things more.

Submission by Staff

It is with great pleasure that Plain Black announces the launch of our latest service WebGUI TV (WGTV). WGTV is an online library of over 150 training videos that show you how to use all aspects of WebGUI content publishing.

Submission by Ehab Heikal ValueCMS ( www.valuecms.com ) announced on 14th of Febuary 2005 that it is starting a new hand holding service with its WebGUI hosting accounts. The hand holding service is designed to help non technical users to be able to quickly learn and become productive in using WebGUI. This service includes not only installing WebGUI, but also unlimited advice, consultation and technical support of every thing related to using WebGUI as a content management platform. This service is bundled with hosting accounts that start at 10$ per month and thus is very affordable.

Submission by Plain Black

The WebGUI Community Contest (WCC) is now underway with cash prizes of more than $3,000. If you're a web designer or perl programmer, you should check it out. You can win some cold hard cash!

The WCC has a simple premise: the community members that participate make some money, and the rest of the community benefits from the results.

Last year we had some incredible entries, over 30 in all. There were a dozen or so web designs, a shopping cart, a project planner, a real estate listings system, an indexed search engine, and much much more. We see no reason why this year should be any different. We hope to get even more participants this year.

Perl Programmers
If you're a Perl programmer you can write all sorts of macros, authentication systems, applications, and utilities for WebGUI. The sky is the limit. And with only a few hours of work, you could be hundreds or even thousands of dollars richer!

Web Designers
Our community is hungry for new themes they can use in their sites. Whether it be a web design, a new set of templates for the forums, or even some kind of new navigation layout, you too have an incredible shot at winning the grand prize.

Check out the rules and then get to work. But above all, have fun with it. This is a game after all.

Submission by Plain Black

The 2004 WebGUI User's Conference is now open for registration. Act quickly and get a $100 discount on the registration fee.

During the conference we'll cover 23 seperate topics in 2 jam-packed days. There should be something for everyone from business people, to web designers, to content managers, to developers, and system administrators.

If you want to know more about WebGUI there's no better place to do it than the conference.